An hour later his teeth had stopped chattering. The aches and discomfort were fading away, leaving his clothes soaked in cold sweat. “I fucking hate sober-ups,” Ozzie growled at Nelson. “They’re not natural. Son of a bitch, look at my clothes.” He plucked at his wet T-shirt in disgust.
“We brought your bags,” Nelson said. “You can freshen up on the train. “We’ll be landing in five minutes.”
“Landing where?”
“The planetary station.”
“Great. I’ve got to pee.”
Nelson gestured down the aisle.
Ozzie slowly slipped his straps off, and rose unsteadily to his feet. Orion was sitting in the chair behind. “You okay there, dude?”
The boy nodded. “I think Tochee was worried, but I told him we’d be all right. He doesn’t understand how important you are.”
“I’ll try and explain to it later.”
“Ozzie,” the boy said quietly. “She’s really nice. We talked a lot. She’s called Lauren. She was really interested in the Silfen paths and where we’ve been.”
Ozzie glanced around at the security team member Orion was surreptitiously indicating. “Uh, okay; again, she’s polite in that serial-killer fashion because that’s her job. Don’t ask her to marry you or anything.”
“All right, Ozzie.” The boy pouted.
The hypersonic came down on a landing pad behind the station’s cluster of administration buildings. There was no one around to see them disembark and hurry over to the sleek private maglev express with its two carriages.
“Just us?” Ozzie asked when he looked down the deserted front carriage. There were big spherical chairs set along the length of the carriage, with a bar at the far end.
“Just you,” Nelson confirmed.
Ozzie took one of his new cases into the washroom to change. His attempt to interface with the unisphere was completely unsuccessful. His inserts reported the train was efficiently screened.
Back out in the carriage, Ozzie raided the bar for some sandwiches, then went to sit near to Tochee and Orion. He acted as tour guide as the express hurtled along, pointing out the worlds they passed through. The Big15 planet Shayoni first, which led to Beijing, followed by a fast trip around the trans-Earth loop to New York, and finally Augusta.
“Your transport is so much more efficient that the Silfen method,” Tochee said. “And your worlds so ordered. Do you disapprove of disarray?”
“Don’t judge us on what you’ve seen so far,” Ozzie told it.
At New Costa station their train peeled away from the main area of the yard to slide through a lone gateway.
“And this has to be Cresset,” Ozzie said. “I haven’t been here for a while.”
“Seventy-three years,” Nelson said as the maglev glided in to Illanum station. More dark cars were waiting for them.
“Where now?” Ozzie asked.
“One of Nigel’s residences just outside the town.”
“All of us?”
“Yes, all of you. We have suitable rooms prepared.”
“Okay then.” Ozzie was giving the station’s cargo handling sector a suspicious look. Its capacity had jumped up by an order of magnitude since he’d last visited.
The “residence” was a big mansion of pale stone modeled on the stately homes of eighteenth-century Europe. It was several kilometers out of town, and surrounded by towering trees that were oppressively dark in the deepening twilight.
“You’ll be all right,” Ozzie told his companions when they walked into the big entrance hall. Orion’s expression was dropping into a sullenness that Ozzie recognized only too well. “Get some sleep, we’ll talk in the morning.”
Nelson led the way through the mansion to a study overlooking the front lawns. There was a greenway outside, barely visible now the sun had set. Ozzie wasn’t sure if he remembered it or not; it did seem vaguely familiar. He resented not having access to the unisphere after only just being reconnected.
Nigel was waiting in a big leather armchair. “Thanks, Nelson.”
Nelson smiled tightly and left, closing the door behind him. Ozzie’s inserts told him a strong e-seal had come on around the room. “Just us, huh?”
“Just us.” Nigel waved a hand at a chair identical to his own.
“Shouldn’t the fire be blazing away?” Ozzie said as he sat down. “With like maybe one of those big hairy dogs stretched out in front of it.”
“Irish wolfhound.”
“And you an’ me jiving away with some brandy.”
“You’ve had enough to drink today.”
“Okay, Nige, so what’s with the big CIA spook operation? My unisphere address is open. You could have called.”
“Better this way. That kid you’ve turned up with tells an interesting story. And the alien; nobody’s seen anything like it before. Communication by photoluminescent visual signals in the ultraviolet spectrum. The xenobiologists are going to love that.”
“Tochee’s an okay dude, sure.”
“So you walked the Silfen paths?”
“Yeah, man. They are the most incredible wormhole network imaginable. I think they’re sentient in their own right. That’s why we can never quite track them down, they move the whole time, opening and closing, timeshifting, too.”
“Figures. Incorporating a wormhole’s control routines into a self-sustaining exotic energy matrix is one of our research projects.”
“Clunky, man, so clunky compared to this.”
“So what did you find? Have they got an SI equivalent?”
“Yeah, something like that. It has a shitload of data, like a galactic library. I know who put the barriers around the Dyson Pair.”
Nigel listened silently while Ozzie told him about finding the Ice Citadel, and Tochee, and seeing the ghost planet’s history, and finally ending up in the gas halo. “So this Anomine species isn’t going to help us?” he asked.
“No,” Ozzie said. “Sorry, man.”
“That was a well-spent time away, then. Are you happy?”
“Hey, fuck you!”
“Why did you order the Dynasty political office to prevent anyone examining cargo sent to Far Away?”
“Uh.” Ozzie gave a sickly grin. That wasn’t exactly what he was expecting to talk about. “Well, man, you know, like, it was oppressive. I don’t dig that at all.”
“Ozzie, give the bullshit routine a rest, will you? There’s too much at stake. If you haven’t worked it out yet, I’m trying to decide whose side you’re on.”
“Side?”
“Are you a Starflyer agent, Ozzie?” Nigel asked quietly. There was a glint of moisture in his eye. “Damnit, do you have any idea how much it hurts just to have to ask you that?”
“You know the Starflyer’s real?” an equally astounded Ozzie blurted.
“Yeah, we know it’s real, we just found out. So, why the political restriction?”
“I didn’t know if it was real.”
“What made you even suspect?”
“I met this dude, Bradley Johansson, man, could he spin a story. He claimed he’d been to the gas halo, that the Silfen had removed his Starflyer conditioning. I’d never heard anything like it. He almost made sense. So I asked myself, what if he was right? You know? I mean, it’s a big universe out there, Nige, anything is possible.”
“So you took a chance, and threw in with him. It was fun, wasn’t it, Ozzie; fun being on the other side, sticking it to the man.”
“I’m not that shallow.”
“Yes you are.” Nigel narrowed his eyes. “When did you meet him?”
“God, man, I dunno, like over a century ago.”
“Before or after he founded the Guardians?”
“Same time. He was just getting his act together.”
Nigel tented his fingers in front of his face, staring hard at Ozzie. Suddenly his eyes widened in shock. “Oh, my God, you stupid, stupid son of a bitch. I don’t believe it.”
“What?” Ozzie asked, disturbed
by his friend’s behavior.
“The Great Wormhole Heist.”
“Ah.” Ozzie couldn’t help a slight smirk. “That.”
“You helped him. I always wondered how the hell they got into the supercomputer routines we’d written; the access codes were all our personal encryption. You gave him the codes, didn’t you?”
“Better than that,” Ozzie said evilly.
“How better?”
“I was one of them.”
“One of … oh, fuck, Ozzie. You were part of the Great Wormhole Heist?”
“Sure, man, it was a blast.”
“A blast? Jee-zus, Ozzie, that was Paula Myo’s case. Suppose she’d caught Johansson? His memory read would have shown you taking part.”
“It was worth it. You have no idea how high I got creeping around that museum, giving the guards the finger when the force field came on around us. Then we just waltzed right into the Vegas vault. Shit, Nigel, even we don’t have that much money. It was stacked to the fucking rooftops, like a dragon’s bed of gold.”
“It’s less than an hour’s income for CST, you dickbrain, and we own half of Vegas anyway. Why didn’t you just give Johansson an open credit transfer?”
“I knew you wouldn’t get it. Nigel, man, we built that machine with our own two hands; it’s still our finest hour, not CST. That was the two of us against the world back then. That generator was built with love, it’s part of us, the kid our souls had together. It wasn’t fair leaving it to be gawped at by bunches of schoolkids like some freakshow exhibit. I gave it a swan song that’ll never be forgotten.”
“It wasn’t in danger of being overlooked; it’s the foundation for our whole society.” Nigel groaned out loud, and appealed silently to whatever rationality Ozzie believed in. “Why didn’t you just come and tell me about the Starflyer?”
“And you’d have listened, and taken it all seriously? Come on. Nige, you are The Man. You’d have told me and Johansson to go take a flying leap, then given me another lecture about being stoned.” He gave his friend a kindly smile. “How long have you known the Starflyer is real, Nige, I mean, really accepted it’s a genuine twenty-four-karat pain in humanity’s ass? Be honest.”
“We’ve suspected something weird’s been going on behind the scenes for a while now. I wasn’t sure if it was the SI. One of its agents was involved.”
“How long?” Ozzie chanted; he wasn’t about to let Nigel off this one.
“Couple of days.”
“Pretty good. Longer than I’d have given you credit for.”
“Oh, like you were sure,” Nigel snapped back. “You who were so confident you used Johansson as an excuse to play superthief for kicks. You know, I bet you’re secretly pissed Johansson hasn’t been caught. For a hundred thirty years you’ve been waiting for this little stunt to get added to the catalogue of Ozzie legends, haven’t you?”
Ozzie pulled a sullen expression, modeled on Orion at his worst. “I was playing long odds, is all. I told you: Johansson was convincing. Somebody should have taken a close look. And don’t sit there telling me I shouldn’t have done anything. Look outside and see the kind of super-deep shit we’re in right now.”
“Were.”
“What?”
“Were in deep shit. I’ve managed to pull us out of it. There’s not going to be any more MorningLightMountain anymore, or the Starflyer.”
That little edge of conceit was something about Nigel that always bugged Ozzie. “What have you done, Nigel?”
“I’m sending a ship to Dyson Alpha; a nova bomb is going to take care of MorningLightMountain once and for all. This is all going to be settled within a week.”
“Nova bomb? Is that what your secret weapon is? Nobody on the unisphere knows. What the fuck is it?”
“Same principle as a diverted-energy-function nuke, but bigged up like you wouldn’t believe. Our Dynasty weapons development team took the diverted-energy principle, and bolted it onto a quantumbuster. Simple really, the quantumbuster effect field converts any matter within its radius directly into energy, only now that energy is diverted into expanding the effect field farther. And that’s a lot of energy. The field grows large enough to convert a measurable percentage of a star, which gives us an explosion on the same scale as a nova. It annihilates the star and any planet orbiting within a hundred AUs. The radiation will be lethal to any habitable planet within another thirty or so light-years.”
Ozzie frowned, horribly intrigued despite every liberal moral he possessed. “That’s an impossible feedback.”
“Not quite. It only has to hold together for a fraction of a second. Conversion is almost instantaneous. That gives us a loophole.”
“No.” Ozzie put his hands to his temples, shaking his head hard enough to make his hair wave from side to side. Realization of what was about to happen was affecting his body far worse than any little sober-up tablet forced down his throat. He really did think he was going to be physically sick. “No, no, I don’t give shit about the mechanics. Nigel, you can’t do this, man. You can’t kill MorningLightMountain, it is the Primes now, their whole species.”
“We’ve been through this, Ozzie; the War Cabinet, Dynasty heads, the StPetersburg team; we looked at every tactical scenario, every option. There’s nothing else we can do. MorningLightMountain is trying to exterminate us, just like the Starflyer planned. Maybe you should have tried a little harder to get me to take notice of Johansson instead of playing the romantic underdog. Not that you ever were that, Ozzie, it just suits you to pretend so you can get laid more often. Well, wake up and smell the coffee; we’re not college students anymore, Ozzie, we left California behind three and a half centuries ago. Grow up; I had to—and I get laid more than you because of it. Why do you think I used your name in the War Cabinet announcement? People trust you, Ozzie, they like you. If you’d kicked up a fuss back when you met Johansson, they would have listened; Heather would have busted the Starflyer’s corruption apart like a jackhammer on glass. Don’t go around blaming me and calling me a warmonger. You knew, Ozzie, you goddamn knew about a threat to the entire human race, and you didn’t fucking tell anyone. Who’s to blame, Ozzie? Who backed us into this corner, huh? Who took away our options?”
Ozzie had sunk back into the chair as Nigel’s voice grew louder. It wasn’t often Nigel, the original calculating iceman, lost his temper, but when he did it was best not to interrupt—people had been ruined, or worse, for making that mistake. Besides, there was a nasty taste of guilt spreading around Ozzie’s brain like a fast-acting poison. “It’s genocide, man,” he said simply and quietly. There was no logical argument he could come up with to counter the tirade. “It is so not what we are.”
“You think I don’t fucking know that,” Nigel stormed. “I wore the same T-shirts as you, I went on the same marches. I hated the military industrial imperialism that ran the world back then. Now look where you’ve put me!”
“Okay.” Ozzie raised his hands. “Just calm down, man.”
“I am fucking calm. Anybody else, Ozzie, and I mean anybody, and they would have been wiped from history by now. Nobody would question what happened to you, because you would never have existed.”
“I’ve seen it happen, man,” Ozzie whispered. “I walked one of the ghost planets. I witnessed their history; I felt them die, Nigel, every last one of them. You can’t let it happen. You just can’t, I’m begging you, man. I’m on my goddamn knees, here. Don’t do this.”
“There is no other way.”
“There’s always another way. Look, Clouddancer said the barrier generator was only disabled, not destroyed.”
Nigel gave him a startled look. “It was a variant on the flare bomb, we think; it altered the generator’s quantum structure.”
“There, see! The generator is still there. We’ve just got to repair it, get it working again.”
“Ozzie!” Nigel gave his friend a weary, despairing look. “You’re grasping at straws. It’s not you.”
“We have to try.”
“Ozzie, think it through. The barrier generator is the size of a planet, and we’ve got days, maybe only hours before MorningLightMountain strikes back at the Commonwealth. If it does, it will kill us, it will genocide the human race. Do you understand that?”
“Let me try,” Ozzie implored. “You’re sending a ship, right, the one with the nova bomb?”
“Yeah. We developed something new, Ozzie, this drive is something else again. It doesn’t use any of our old wormhole technology; you really do just jump into hyperspace. MorningLightMountain can’t detect it.”
“Perfect! Let me go on it. I can take a look at the generator. You know if anyone can work it out, I can.”
“Ozzie—”
“MorningLightMountain won’t know I’m there. If it starts an attack on the Commonwealth I’ll fling a nova bomb into its star myself. But we have to try this. Let me go, Nigel. It’s a chance. I know you, man; you won’t be able to live with yourself if you don’t at least consider it.”
“Ozzie, every physicist in the Commonwealth has been studying the data which the Second Chance gathered on the generator. We don’t even know what some of the shells are, let alone what they do. And we certainly don’t know how to build sections of them. Not inside a week. Get real here.”
“I can do it, I know I can. There must be a self-repair function, something that can undo the damage. Yeah! Clouddancer said it should outlive the star itself. If the Starflyer could have destroyed the generator, it would. That gives us a chance.”
“You’re not going, Ozzie.”
“Give me one good reason.”
“I don’t trust you.”
For a moment Ozzie thought Nigel had hit him—his skin certainly went numb the way it did after a sharp blow. He couldn’t hear anything either. The air in the study had turned dead. “What?” His voice was a piteous croak.
“I don’t know if you’re a Starflyer agent or not. If it’s going to take a last shot at defeating us, then this would be absolutely perfect. So read my lips: you are not taking our two most secret weapons into the MorningLightMountain star system by yourself. They are the only guarantees of racial survival we’ve got.”
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 202
