‘Then what?’
‘When I’ve got more information, I’ll tell you. We need to know what they’re going to do after the initial bombardment. Anna, bring the rest of the strategy and command staff in, please. We’re going to need a lot of help today.’
‘Yes, sir. I’m tracking the starships now.’
White indicators appeared inside the starfield, tagged with identification data. He had seven ships within range of the detector network. Two scoutships were days away, outside the Commonwealth, while the warships and remaining scoutships were spread out around the indistinct boundary of phase three space. Wilson made a decision. ‘Contact the captains,’ he told Anna. ‘I want them all to rendezvous half a light-year out from Anshun.’ Their old base was the CST junction planet for the sector, and as such the most heavily populated. ‘We’ll start our counterattack there.’ At least neither of them laughed outright at that.
‘Oh goddamnit,’ Rafael grunted.
Inside the tactical display another swarm of amber warning icons were blinking up, much deeper in Commonwealth space around planet twenty-four: Wessex.
‘Do what you can for them,’ Wilson told Rafael. He wished it didn’t sound like a feeble joke. Could we have known it was going to be this massive? A terrible thought crept out: the Guardians knew.
‘Sir,’ Anna exclaimed. ‘I’ve got Captain Tu Lee on a direct link. They were still at the Anshun base.’
‘What?’
‘She’s on the Second Chance.’
Wilson’s virtual hand blurred as it jabbed at the communication icon. ‘What’s your situation?’ he demanded as Tu Lee’s anxious face appeared in his virtual vision.
‘Disengaged from the dock.’ Tu Lee winced. Her image suffered a ripple of static. ‘Taking some incoming fire. Force field holding. What are your orders?’
Wilson almost whooped out loud. Finally, some good news. ‘Eliminate as many of the planetary bombardment projectiles as you can. Don’t, repeat, do not try and take on a wormhole. Not yet. I need information on them.’
‘Aye, sir.’
‘Godspeed, Captain.’
*
The Second Chance’s big life-support wheel finished its emergency de-spin procedure, eliminating the problem of precession, which had been screwing up their manoeuvring ability.
‘Full acceleration,’ Tu Lee ordered the pilot. She’d been captain for a week now, taking over when the ship docked after its last mission. The navy had sent it on a deep scouting mission three hundred light-years from the Commonwealth. It didn’t have the speed of any of the new scoutships, but it beat them hands down on endurance. It also had the kind of delta-v reserve that only the new warships could match.
Their plasma rockets responded smoothly to the pilot’s instructions, producing one and a half gees acceleration. They were a thousand kilometres above Anshun’s nightside equator, and curving round above the second-largest ocean. The big portals at the front of the bridge were showing brilliant white flares of nukes detonating below them. Tu Lee bared her teeth in fury at the devastation. For her the light was carefully colour-coded and intensity-graded; for anyone on the surface it was near-certain death.
‘Laroch, have we got a pattern for the emergence sequence yet?’ she asked.
‘I can confirm there’s forty-eight wormholes,’ said Laroch, who was operating the sensor console. ‘But they keep jumping around at random. The only constant is their altitude, about one and a half thousand klicks.’
‘Okay, let’s keep under that level, and track the bombardment projectiles in range. Weapons, fire whenever we get a lock. Pilot, if there’s a cluster, get us in range.’
‘Incoming,’ Laroch called.
Eight alien missiles hurtled in towards the Second Chance. The pilot vectored their plasma rockets, altering trajectory. Plasma lances fired out from the starship’s midsection, ripping across space before bursting apart on the missiles’ force fields. Lasers locked on, pumping gigawatts of energy into the force fields, straining them badly. The plasma lances fired again finally overloading the missiles’ shielding. Multiple detonations blossomed silently above the planet, their plasma clouds merging into a seething patch of pure light over fifty kilometres across.
‘Batch of sixteen projectiles emerged,’ Laroch called out. ‘Heading for the planet.’
The bridge portals had them tagged, green needles with vector digits flicking round at high speed. Tu Lee called up the ship’s own missile launch command, and fired a volley of interceptors. As they leaped away at fifty gees she loaded in a sequential pattern of diverted energy functions for their war-heads. The interceptors split apart into a cascade of independently targeted vehicles, rocket exhausts expanding like a starburst of lightning bolts as they spread out in pursuit of the alien projectiles. Megaton warheads detonated, a chain of dazzling lightpoints distorting the planet’s ionosphere in huge undulations, their diverted energy function sending huge emp effects rippling out.
Several of the alien weapons immediately went dead, their exhausts fading away as they tumbled inertly down towards the dark landscape hundreds of kilometres below. A second bar-rage of warheads detonated. This time the diverted energy was channelled into one-shot x-ray lasers, directing seventy per cent of the explosion’s power into a single slender beam of ultrahard radiation. Every remaining projectile broke apart, glowing debris flying outwards in sinister mimicry of a meteorite shower’s splendour.
Four more wormholes opened close to the Second Chance, thirty-two missiles flew out from each. Delicate fans of sensor radiation stroked against the starship. The gee force on the bridge swung round, pressing Tu Lee into the side of her chair. Straps tightened around her shoulders and waist, holding her in place.
‘There might be a lot of them,’ Laroch said. ‘But their soft-ware is useless. I’m picking up a lot of microwave emissions from the wormholes. The missiles are being continuously updated and guided.’
The Second Chance was firing volley after volley of plasma lances at the new attackers as they closed at twenty gees. A massive series of nuclear explosions turned space outside the starship a glaring uniform white. Waves of thin plasma slithered across the outer force field, shaking the superstructure. Tu Lee could hear loud metallic groans as the hull twisted and flexed from the pummelling. It was as if they were flying through a star’s corona, blinded by the hot radiation glare and buffeted by relativistic particle currents. The starship streaked out of the energy storm, a shimmering scarlet bubble trailing long cataracts of hydrogen plasma. Twenty-four alien missiles chased round to intercept her.
Alarms were shrieking from every bridge console. Screens threw up systems schematics as the crew and the RI tried to re-establish functions.
‘Jump us out,’ Tu Lee ordered.
At the hyperdrive console, Lindsay Sanson activated the wormhole generator. Second Chance vanished from space above the planet.
‘How bad is that software?’ Tu Lee demanded.
‘Strange,’ Laroch said. ‘It’s very inflexible, nothing like as advanced as ours. It’s almost as if they don’t have smart programs.’
‘We can use that,’ Tu Lee said. She glanced at the main status display. There was nothing too critical with the star-ship’s systems. Most of the damage had been absorbed by peripherals in the life-support wheel, along with some hull ablation and tank breaches. Without the exploration and science teams they only had forty crew on board, so no one was in any immediate danger. ‘Get everyone into spacesuits,’ she said as she called up a display of their missile reserves. ‘Then take us back.’
A lambent patch of turquoise light twisted out of nowhere eight hundred kilometres above Anshun’s capital, Treloar. Second Chance leapt out of its centre as the nimbus shrank away. The starship fired fifteen missiles, then her wormhole generator distorted space again and she vanished back into hyperspace. She reappeared almost instantaneously five thousand kilometres away, this time above Bromrine, a coastal city with a population of two h
undred thousand, cowering under their protective force field dome. Another fifteen missiles were fired before she dived back into hyperspace.
She made another nine jumps around the planet, launching all one hundred and seventy-three remaining missiles.
As soon as they were released, the missiles in each salvo fired their rockets briefly, spreading out from their launch point, then shut down. Their sensors scanned round, searching for a wormhole. When one emerged, they ignited their rockets again, racing towards it at fifty gees. The standard barrage of alien projectiles barely had time to clear the worm-hole rim before they were subjected to emp assault, electronic warfare, x-ray laser pulses, kinetic impacts, and nuclear blasts. Very few of them ever made it through to slam down against the planet.
Second Chance popped out of hyperspace again and began a quick data transmission to the beleaguered world below, telling the navy how they had mined near-orbit space. Eight wormholes emerged, encircling the starship at five hundred kilometres. Lindsay Sanson activated their hyperdrive. ‘Shit!’
‘What?’ Tu Lee asked. The bridge portals were still showing Anshun below them, its once-passive cloud formations swirling in agitation in the aftermath of the explosions.
‘Interference. Space is so distorted from their wormholes we can’t open ours. It’s deliberate, they modified the quantum fluctuations to block us.’
‘Move us,’ Tu Lee yelled at the pilot.
Second Chance’s plasma drive came on. She began to accelerate at over three gees.
Another eight Prime wormholes emerged around the starship.
‘Fuck you,’ Tu Lee told the Primes.
Ninety-six missiles flew out of each wormhole.
*
Nigel Sheldon had been taking breakfast in his New Costa mansion when the alert from the navy detector network came through. He hadn’t been back to Cressat, his family’s private world, for the last five months; spending his time between Augusta and Earth. It was prudent, he felt, not to be too remote should anything happen, even with the blessing of modern communications. And now he was being proved terribly right.
Shielding sprang up around the mansion; communications shifted to secure links. He closed his eyes and relaxed back into the chair as the mansion’s internal shields came on, isolating the rooms. The full range of his interface inserts went on line, allowing his sensorium to absorb digital data at an accelerated rate. Combat aerobots launched from bases dotted round the outskirts of New Costa. Startled residents gaped up into the bright morning sky to see the dark shapes roaring upwards to their high-altitude patrol stations. Force fields closed off the sky behind them.
With Augusta’s defences activated, Nigel switched his attention back to the attack. His enhanced display showed the twenty-three Commonwealth planets where the alien worm-holes intruded; the wormholes themselves manifested as a tactile sensation, like pinpricks across his skin. The SI responded to his request and joined him inside the tactical simulacrum, a small ball of knotted tangerine and turquoise lines fluctuating rhythmically as they floated in the nothingness beside him.
‘That’s a lot of wormholes,’ he said.
‘Dimitri Leopoldovich always said the assault would be conducted on a large scale. This probably does not represent their full capability.’
There was a background whisper in Nigel’s greatly expanded perception as he registered the flurry of orders slipping out from the navy’s headquarters on the High Angel, coordinating sensor data and marshalling what resources they had. ‘Poor old Wilson,’ he murmured. He concentrated on several icons in a small galaxy of symbols that were hovering in the background. They moved obediently. Using the deep connections wetwired into his brain, this interface was more like telepathy than the simple virtual hands array of standard domestic interface programs.
Force fields came on around every CST planetary station in the Commonwealth. On the twenty-three worlds under attack, there was almost no warning. Local trains coming into the stations braked sharply, their engines skidding along the tracks, as they approached the implacable translucent barriers which had risen in front of them. Not all of them managed to halt in time. Several engines hit the force fields and jumped the tracks, slewing round; carriages and wagons jackknifed, crunching into each other, smashing apart, crumpling up, flinging passengers and goods across embankments and cuttings. Cars and trucks arriving along the highways were ordered to brake by traffic route management software. Lead vehicles rammed the force fields; pileups dominoed back down the roads.
Information on damage and casualties slipped into Nigel’s mind. Nothing compared to the destruction pouring down out of the sky all around them. He ignored the figures. There had been no choice; without the stations and their precious gateways there would be no Commonwealth.
The remaining stations across the Commonwealth at least allowed arriving trains over the perimeter before their force fields went up. On the highways outside, huge queues formed along every carriageway, trailing back for miles. Those people trapped on the inside settled down for a long wait, quietly thankful about which side of the force field they were on.
Nigel saw city force fields power up as Rafael started to use the navy’s new planetary defence network, overriding local civil authorities. He sent combat aerobots rocketing skywards, big machines of unmistakable military ugliness, firing as they went. Prime projectiles were blown out of the stratosphere as they descended. But the sheer quantity of projectiles allowed several to slip through to pound at the force fields. Large areas of the surrounding countryside were flattened or reduced to lakes of glass, but the force fields held.
The CST station on Wessex actually beat the navy’s detector network in alerting Nigel to the wormholes opening above that planet. When he switched his attention there he was immediately aware of Alan Hutchinson’s command programs flooding through the Wessex cybersphere as the founder of that particular Big15 world took charge of its defences. Multiple force fields came on around Narrabri, its megacity. The planet’s small tactical defence brigade was ordered to deploy around the perimeter, activating their ground-to-air interceptor batteries. Squadrons of combat aerobots launched from their silos to patrol the skies above the force fields.
Alan Hutchinson’s face flittered across Nigel’s consciousness, grinning savagely. Three of his aerobots fired their atom lasers, taking out incoming Prime projectiles as they hit the upper atmosphere.
‘Good shooting,’ Nigel said.
‘Makes a decent change from finance reports,’ was the gruff Aussie’s hearty comment.
Another salvo of projectiles shot out of four wormholes. They were answered by a battery of firepower from the planet below.
‘Thank Christ for that,’ Alan said as molten radioactive debris scudded down across the ocean. ‘We can hit back at the bastards.’ Data coming back from the other afflicted Commonwealth worlds was depressing. Other than cities protected by force fields and aerobots they were woefully unprepared.
‘You can knock out a few missiles,’ Nigel said. ‘But at this rate we’re going to lose. They have a thousand times our resources.’
‘Well gee it up, why don’t you?’
Both of them paused to observe the Second Chance fly into action above Anshun.
‘Go, Tu Lee, go,’ Nigel whispered out loud. He tried to suppress the anxiety he felt for his young descendant. Emotional distraction was the one thing he couldn’t afford right now.
Hundreds more projectiles were fired down at Wessex. Alan didn’t have enough aerobots to cover the more remote areas. Towns scattered across the continent-wide farmlands were wiped out as the Prime projectiles fell freely. ‘Mother-fuckers,’ Alan growled. ‘What threat did those people ever make?’
‘Can you see an attack pattern in this?’ Nigel asked the SI. ‘Is there a strategy? Or are they just trying to wipe us out?’
‘The planets selected imply a double target approach,’ the SI said. ‘The twenty-three outer worlds are a strong foothold into the Commo
nwealth; while the addition of Wessex with its gateways to phase two space planets, if successful, would allow them to occupy a huge proportion of territory, effectively eliminating the Commonwealth as a single entity, especially if they managed to occupy Earth as well.’
‘They’ll never get the Narrabri station,’ Nigel said harshly. ‘I’ll make quite sure of that.’
‘They can’t know our exact response,’ the SI said. ‘This is as exploratory for them as it is for us. The goal of securing Wessex is a logical one. They can afford to lose the venture, yet if they do obtain the gateways at Narrabri station they will have a backdoor into sixty developed worlds.’
‘What the hell for? What do they want with us?’
‘Judging by the projectile targets, we would infer they want to obtain as much human infrastructure as is practical. They are happy to eliminate the smaller civic areas to earn the larger ones. Even if they were to be repelled immediately, most of the surviving population from the twenty-three worlds under attack would have to be evacuated. The land around the cities is radioactive slag, crops are ruined, the climate has been disrupted. They are in danger of losing their H-congruous status without a huge amount of very expensive retroforming.’
‘Son of a bitch,’ Nigel grunted. ‘You’re talking genocide.’
‘Possibly.’
‘Oh Christ,’ Alan exclaimed. ‘They’ve got her.’
Nigel watched with radar and optical sensors as the Second Chance valiantly accelerated out of orbit, struggling to shake off the surrounding Prime wormholes. The starship’s brilliant plasma rockets were extinguished behind a nuclear furnace of elementary particles that inflated out across five hundred kilometres.
‘Son of a bitch,’ Nigel barked. ‘Tu Lee, you did a magnificent job. I’m so proud. And I will hear your laugh again.’
‘Goddamn,’ Alan said. ‘I’m sorry, Nigel.’
‘We can’t just sit here and take this kind of punishment,’ Nigel said. ‘We have to show them we can fight back.’
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