Adiamante

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “Thanks!” I linked into the main nets, at all levels, and preempted all traffic. Coordinators get to do that. They also get to suffer the consequences. “This is Coordinator Ecktor. The Construct has been violated. Armed marcybs are attacking Deseret locial. The Construct has been violated. Complete final emergency evacuations of all locials. Complete final emergency evacuations of all locials. Complete hardening, and close down. All demis stand by for defense node activation. All demis stand by for defense node activation.”

  Then I pulsed to Keiko. “Emergency evacuation. Close down and head for the bullets.”

  Next came uppernet and Elanstan.

  “Power up for immediate defense net activation. The cybs have launched a ground attack on Deseret locial. I’ve put out the call for node activation.”

  “The boards are greening,” pulsed Elanstan. “We’re already at twenty percent.” There was a pause. “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely sure. We’ve got armed marcybs here and in Ellay, although the Ellay troops are running slightly behind the ones here. What do you have on your screens?”

  “All hulls are in full-power status, and their screens are radiating into the purple. No acceleration, and no power concentrations aft.”

  “Let me know if it changes. Priority override.”

  “Stet, Coordinator.”

  I dropped off that segment and repeated the evacuation notice process with the Deseret locial net. While I could have asked Keiko, when time counts, it’s faster to do it yourself. Then I dropped onto the maintenance level and used the Coordinator’s keys to freeze all the locial’s system controls and shunt them out to the defense control center.

  “Let’s go!” I snapped at Kemra.

  “Go?”

  I took a last look, and it would indeed be a last look, out the wide windows of the Coordinator’s office. Outside, the pines waved in the stiff wind, and puffy white clouds scudded toward the eastern peaks. The streets were empty, but the streets of the locials were never that crowded, and I doubted that the cybs would even bother with time-comparative scans.

  “Your former compatriots are about to begin their effort to wipe out society and most technology on Old Earth.” I headed for the door. “If you wish to have a momentary and firsthand view, you can certainly stay. Otherwise, I suggest you follow me.”

  She followed.

  I took the stairs two at a time. There’s a time for decorum and a time to run like a crazed vorpal’s after you, except a crazed vorpal’s an oxymoron. This was the time to run.

  Fast as I was, the building was clear—handling the shunts had taken several minutes—all the way down to the sublevels.

  From the third sublevel, we went down the concealed stairs in the back of the lower power boards. Kemra’s eyes were wide, but she was breathing heavily even before we came out on the narrow platform where Keiko stood, waiting, beside the bullet shuttle cars, shimmering in the lights of the admin building’s sublevels.

  “Everyone else took the first bullet,” my aide said.

  “Good. The building looks clear. You left the doors open for the main bullets? We’ll hold the power as long as we can. All systems are shunted out to the control center. Draffs?”

  Keiko nodded. “We can’t tell, but we estimate above ninety-five percent clear.”

  I touched the plate on the side of the front car. As the door slid open, I gestured to Kemra, who stood there wide-eyed. “Get in.”

  “You never …”

  “Get in—unless you want to get fried when your fleet’s weapons hit.”

  Kemra slid into the front seat and I took the seat next to her. Keiko took the one behind us.

  The doors slid shut and the bullet shuttles whined forward and dropped into the dark tube. Only a faint red light illuminated the interior.

  “What about all the draffs? Are you just leaving them to get incinerated?”

  “No. Except for the handful necessary to maintain the locial, I had everything evacuated earlier. Didn’t it seem quiet when you came in? The others left while we were discussing your ultimatum—except for a dozen or so on the bullet before us. There might be two or three techs on the ones after us, but they had warning, and I can’t wait now.”

  I had to use the boost to get to uppernet.

  “Elanstan. Status on the cybs?”

  “They’re easing into lower orbit, at five percent power.” A flash image seared at me, and I nodded. “Power drop … appears to be a glide and decel. They’re dropping into position. Holding now. No action yet.”

  I swallowed. How long would Gibreal hold his ships? How long would synchronization take? Five minutes? A stan?

  “How long will it take Gibreal to synchronize the fleet once he’s in lower orbit?” I asked Kemra.

  “How did you—”

  “How long?”

  “Ten minutes, longer if he’s going to use particle beams.”

  I went back uppernet. “The subcommander says it’ll be ten. Don’t be hair-trigger, but don’t take that as a hard schematic.”

  “We understand,” answered Rhetoral. “They’re not stabilized in lower orbit yet, anyway.”

  I took a deep breath and checked the bullet. Only another minute before we slid into the control center.

  I was moving as soon as the bullet’s door was wide enough for me to squeeze through. At the top of the platform steps, I glanced back at the tunnel, where the blast doors remained poised to close—as were four sets along the ten-klick tunnel. Then I scrambled up the steps and through the second set of locks. I didn’t look back to see if Kemra and Keiko followed. There wasn’t anywhere else for them to go.

  Even with most of the emergency squad in place, the control center was still stark. It wasn’t designed for large numbers of people, or for long-term isolation—totally isolated, it wouldn’t function for more than a few weeks. The power and ventilation were adequate for years, but the more human necessities such as food and recycling-disposal of wastes weren’t integrated as totally self-contained operations.

  At the center screens were Arielle and Crucelle. Neither looked up, although they had certainly felt me come in.

  “Link boards?”

  “Dorgan, ser.” The thin-haired and thin-faced man nodded at me from the screen at the end.

  “Nets?”

  Wiane glanced up.

  The five of us should have been able to handle the system, but in case we couldn’t, there were backups—Liseal, Keiko, Dyncuun, Sebestien, Vieria, and two others from Crucelle’s group that I didn’t know by name.

  Keiko ushered Kemra to the left rear corner of the center and half-gestured, half-pushed the subcommander into a straight-backed chair. Then Keiko took the last remaining standby screen position.

  I dropped into the empty center chair in front of the representational screen that depicted Old Earth, the asteroid satellite stations, and the Vereal Union fleet—which appeared to have stabilized in something slightly closer to Old Earth than a geocentric orbit.

  The locators were my first priority.

  “Ecktor—you on line?” asked Rhetoral as I was verifying that the cybs had stabilized their ships.

  “That’s affirmative. I have the cybs stable and commencing power build-up. Do you see any acceleration? Interrogative cyb acceleration.”

  “That’s negative.”

  “Hold on net.”

  “Holding net.”

  I took a deep breath, knowing that the cybs were about to attack, but unable to bring up the net until they did something, knowing that the net response would be slower than the weapons, despite all the advisories that Keiko and I had sent.

  The representative screen flashed, as did red lights.

  “Unidentified torps launched! Torps launched!” Rhetoral announced.

  I went into the command line of uppernet. “THE CONSTRUCT HAS BEEN VIOLATED. THE CONSTRUCT HAS BEEN VIOLATED. OLD EARTH IS UNDER ATTACK. UNDER ATTACK. STEP-UP AND LINK TO DEFENSE NET. STEP-UP AND LINK TO DEFENSE
NET. URGENT! URGENT! LINK TO DEFENSE NET!”

  I set the warning to repeat at three minute intervals for fifteen minutes, but before I finished the web had begun to hum. The web hummed, and I shivered into step-up, as the glow around me—around each demi anywhere on Old Earth—built.

  “It’s slow!” came from Rhetoral, his words seemingly dragging out in realtime.

  The locators pinpointed the maroon-dashed torp tracks, and each of the asteroid stations flared purple-white as its screens went up. Almost simultaneously defense beams slashed toward the accelerating cyb torps. Where the beams intersected a torp, a bright star flashed on the screen. Above ground each explosion would have appeared as a star-point, even in mid-day, but I hoped no one was above ground to watch, not near any locial, anyway.

  Despite the defense beams, some torps in the first two waves were going to slip under the net, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  “Line one—in.” The equatorial defense band, glimmering purple-white, shimmered into place.

  Already, I could sense minute flickers along the net, where weaker individual demis were unable to take the strain and went down in mindblazed death.

  The control center was filled with sweat and fear, but no one spoke. I continued to hold the ground focus, as Elanstan and Rhetoral held the station foci where the net energy coruscated into the planetary defense bands.

  “Band one stable and holding; shifting to band two,” gasped Elanstan.

  “Cybs launching attack vessels. Launching attack vessels,” added Rhetoral.

  Maroon dots appeared—fanning out from one of the twelve adiamante hulls hanging over Old Earth.

  They were idiots to try that, but they’d been idiots all along—blind idiots, and we’d all pay for it.

  The lights flared red, and I could sense the particle beams.

  “Line two—now!” I snapped.

  “Line two—in.” The second concentration of power built, eased into position along the second axis. “Running ninety percent,” Elanstan sounded weak already, and that bothered me, shield as she was. Not that we had any options.

  Through the net, I could sense the power building, and the storm nexi changing, and the unholy mess that would follow.

  “Bands three and four!” I ordered.

  “Line three—in.”

  “Line four—in.”

  The agony in their voices tore at me, but we needed the entire shield—now, and now almost wasn’t enough as the twelve ship-powered beams slammed into the net. More flickers through the link nodes told me of hundreds more demis dying, minds and souls shredded.

  I forced my thoughts and concentration back to the representative screen that showed the particle beams splashing off the enhanced magfield that was our only defense.

  “Energy resonation.” That went to Crucelle and Dyncuun, who had meshed with the older demi.

  The reflected energy should have set up unfavorable wave harmonics within the cyb ships—should have—but we didn’t have the scanners to verify that.

  “Continue resonation.”

  The resonation was having another effect—shaking the attack scouts into dust and energy. I tried to block the feelings, but I still felt sorry for the doomed pilots.

  “Line four at eighty percent,” rasped Elanstan through the command lines.

  I shunted the last section of link nodes into line four.

  “Ninety-four percent.” Her signal strengthened, but only slightly.

  “Particle beams depowered,” Rhetoral reported. The rep screen verified the cutoff, and the chill white lines that appeared next confirmed the de-energizers.

  “Reflect one,” I ordered, initiating the shimmer shift, taking the screen a turn underweb—not really a turn, but a fraction of a turn.

  Another clinking shivered along the net as more souls shattered or snuffed out in mindblazed agony.

  The rep screen showed another wave of heavy torps, and another line of attack scouts.

  “Need net-flex,” whispered Elanstan.

  “NET-FLEX … NOW!” I ordered, and threw the focus outward for as short a snap as I could, a snap of mindlinks, boosted with pure energy, trying to shield against the agony that would follow.

  On the rep screen the shield shimmered, then expanded momentarily, shivering space ever so slightly, and an energy curtain fell across the twelve adiamante hulls. The hulls held, but the cyb de-energizers flickered and stuttered.

  As those beams faltered, knives slashed through my skull, knives from the thousands of deaths that single flex had cost.

  Impossibly, the cybs re-energized those beams that tore at the defense shields, and once more white lines jabbed and sucked at the silver barrier, and link nodes, one after another, snuffed black.

  “Lines three and four at eighty-five percent.”

  “Holding.” We had no more link reserves.

  “Target flex, Ecktor! Target flex.” Elanstan’s recommendation sounded as though it had been flayed from her, but she was right.

  “TARGET FLEX—MARK! NOW!”

  Another massive energy boost, and the shield flexed, then narrowed into a purple shaft aimed at the cyb fleet, broad enough to cover them all.

  A sunburst flared where Gamma station had been, followed by Kappa, then Beta, as each station surrendered all the power it had—and more—to throw that shaft.

  As the shaft reached the first Vereal Union ship, space shivered, and so did I, as adiamante fragments sprayed space, releasing more energy.

  I ignored, heart-pounding, the slumped body that had been Crucelle, as I tried to keep that energy focused into its destructive form.

  A second cyb-ship went—and a third.

  More figures slumped around the control center, more souls backblazed into oblivion as the shield energies coruscated across where the cyb fleet had been—and rebounded.

  Elanstan and Rhetoral said nothing, screamed nothing, but their deaths were like two black arrows through me.

  My skull was flayed open, my eyes were blind, streaming tears of acid burned my skin, and I sat there blind and deaf, dumb, for a time. My mouth was dry.

  XXXIV

  “Let’s see,” murmured the fleet commander.”Weapons, hold ten percent of busters. Hold ten, and release the rest.”

  “Ninety away, Commander.”

  Gibreal watched as the ninety torps with the tach-heads flashed forth. Sets of white-dashed lines flared on the screens, like ancient spiderwebs dropping down to bracket Old Earth.

  “No!” protested the envoff—too late, as the cyb commander hammered her into mental jelly with his overrides.

  Twelve purple-white globes flared into existence beyond Old Earth, and from each stabbed lines of purple-white fire. Where each line intersected an accelerating torp, a star-point of light, an instant mini-nova, flared.

  “Helpless? Helpless demis? Hardly.”

  A single white-purple band appeared around the image of Old Earth held in the ops and weapons screens and in the shipnet: a band like an antique halo, except that it circled the planet beyond the atmosphere and directly above the planetary equator.

  “Analyze!” snapped Weapons.

  “Systems unknown,” answered MYL-ERA. “Energy output equivalent to …” The exact number exceeded verbal translations and was projected directly to the net-workers.

  “ … more than a dozen fleets …”

  “Sanitize!” snapped Gibreal. The fleet commander scanned the screens before him in his personal command center, and those he could touch on the net, dismissed both the backup visuals cursorily, and attempted to gauge the enormous power represented by the single white-purple band that arced around the globe that was Old Earth.

  More torps flared into energy, but not all of the ninety launched initially.

  “Dispersal one,” ordered the fleet commander.

  “Dispersal one beginning,” confirmed Weapons, phasing the scout launches so that only a single ship had open locks at one time.

  The ene
rgy humming from the white-purple band around Old Earth seemed to vibrate space itself, setting up a resonance in the Gibson that blurred Gibreal’s visual images on the net, where clarity was never lacking.

  “Network at one hundred ten percent of capacity,” announced MYL-ERA. “Dropping non-ops nodes.”

  The net resonance decreased, but a fuzzy edge remained around the net visuals, and hissing permeated every word and concept hurled along the energy channels and even along the backup fibrelines.

  “Power particle beams.”

  At Gibreal’s command, the full output of hundreds of fusactors within the adiamante hulls of the Vereal fleet transferred pure energy into a dozen lines of white hell that flared toward Old Earth.

  With those energy lines appeared a second purple-white band, snapping into place at right angles to the first, so that Old Earth beneath the energy flows was divided into quarters.

  Then came a third band, and a fourth, and the four bands created a shimmering haze-web behind which the planet seemed to vanish.

  The concentrated energy from the twelve particle beams splashed across the shield, and with that impact, the adiamante hulls began to vibrate, to shiver as adiamante hulls had never shivered for the cybs.

  “Overlap shields,” ordered Gibreal. The energy shields from the twelve adiamante hulls clicked into and around each other, and the humming that had threatened to shake the Gibson into adiamante fragments and metallic dust subsided into a background whine.

  “Systems at one hundred five percent,” reported MYL-ERA.

  “Drop habitation, all nonessentials.”

  “Dropping all nonessentials this time,” responded MYL-ERA.

  Beyond the overlapped shields, the armed scouts flared into energy and subatomic particles.

  “Interrogative halt dispersal one,” asked Weapons.

  “Negative. We need to keep their targets spread.”

  “Old Earth energy expenditure on scout destruction less than one percent of fields in existence,” reported MYL-ERA.

  “Negative,” reiterated Gibreal.

  A second wave of scouts reached the barriers of the linked shields—and vanished into the growing cloud of shimmering dust and energy that flared up before the twelve adiamante hulls.