Eight thousand miles above the Indian Ocean, a Deliverance ship performed an eleven-gee parabolic manoeuvre to align itself on one of the attack formations. Incredibly powerful energy beams stabbed out from it, slicing straight through the cruisers’ defence shields, killing the ships in a blaze of energized vapour. The formation’s survivors responded with a synchronized barrage of Calmissiles. They were small – two metres in diameter – but they used the same principle as human sublight starships, making the teardrop-shaped casing a single portal. Holes accelerating through space at twenty-five gees.
The Deliverance ships only knew they were there because of their exhaust plume. They shot energy beams at them; they fired kinetic harpoons; they detonated thirty-five-megaton warheads, whose plasma spheres saturated local space with high-energy particles. None of them had the slightest effect. Every assault simply passed through the hole, ejecting from the portal’s inert twin thousands of kilometres away.
The first Deliverance ship was struck by seventeen Calmissiles within a one and a half second period. Travelling at over seventy kilometres a second, each of them cored out a perfect tunnel through the ship, slicing through whatever solid structure they encountered. Milliseconds later, each of those gaps was flooded with their fusion plasma exhaust. The Deliverance ship started to disintegrate, only to have the ruptured fragments instantly turn into a sleet of raw atoms.
‘Okay,’ Soćko said. ‘That frightened the onemind.’
‘Start the clearance,’ Johnston ordered. ‘Every Olyix ship below geostationary orbit.’ He focused on the display section locked on northern Utah. ‘Loi, stand by.’
Knockdown Mission
S-Day, 11th December 2206
There were three of them in the transit chamber when its blast doors rumbled shut and locked with a loud series of clunks. In front of Loi, the rims of seven expansion portals glowed a vivid turquoise, surrounding a centre of insubstantial grey, as if they were being lit from behind by weak moonlight.
His suit closed around him in readiness. It was a brute of a thing, adding more than half a metre to his height. Beside him, in hir own suit, Eldlund stood three metres tall. Lim Tianyu was a mere two metres sixty centimetres.
For a brief moment, as the light vanished, Loi was gripped by a pang of claustrophobia. The helmet was solid, like the rest of the suit, its thick carapace the same dull pewter sheen as medieval suits of armour. Loi knew those old knights used to ride on horses specially bred to carry the enormous weight – something else he shared with those long-ago nobles. Right now, he weighed in at more than half a tonne. Unlike the armour that modern mercenaries and corporate security wore on their combat missions, very little of that weight was weaponry. This was all about protection. His armour’s primary purpose was to defend the wearer from radiation. Not even a tactical nuke’s gamma pulse could get through it. Nearly a third of the mass was artificial muscle, without which he wouldn’t even be able to stand, let alone move. The weight and toughness made it apposite for enduring Earth’s wrecked climate. No, this suit didn’t have knights of old in its heritage; its grandparents were more likely to be army tanks.
His tarsus lens splashed the armour’s external sensor image, and his breathing became calmer. Tactical displays showed him the titanic battle going on in space above Salt Lake City. As well as the armada of human warships, the newly enlarged portals above Earth were also shooting out a swarm of sensor satellites to enhance Strikeback’s intelligence-gathering. The G8Turing plotted the byzantine weave of ship vectors. In orbit, Olyix transport ships were being massacred in their hundreds. Deliverance ships were fighting a furious rearguard action against the deluge of cruisers, but there was nothing they could do to stop the Calmissiles.
‘You smashed it, boss,’ Eldlund exclaimed. ‘We’re killing them!’
‘Damn right,’ Loi agreed. ‘Here comes the ground wave.’
Thousands of cruisers were descending into the Earth’s upper atmosphere, unleashing a deluge of Calmissiles towards the Olyix ships that ringed every surviving city. Loi bit on his lip. They couldn’t afford to use nukes close to the overstressed shields, but neither could they avoid using them. This phase had to be convincing.
‘Loi, stand by,’ Johnston ordered.
The tactical splash gave Loi the three best portal options for deployment. ‘Three and five,’ he decided.
‘I concur,’ Eldlund said.
‘Brace yourselves.’
‘Got it,’ Lim said.
All three suits leant forwards.
In front of them, the grey pseudo-centre of portals three and five melted backwards, allowing a different, more vacant, texture of grey to resolve. Air howled in, bringing a flurry of dirt and dust that churned vigorously around the walls. The suits swayed fractionally from the impact, but held position.
Loi consulted the tactical display again. Down in South America and over in China, five-megaton warheads were detonating twenty to thirty kilometres above the ground, close to the convoys of Olyix transport ships lifting off. When the shockwaves slammed down, ships lurched around violently before beginning their fatal nosedives. Those that hadn’t yet launched juddered about on the ground, their hulls thudding into rocks and slopes, crumpling on impact. In response, the Deliverance ships bombarding the city shields diverted their energy beams upwards, targeting the incoming missiles, which relieved some of the pressure on the city shields. More Olyix transport ships used the respite to take off, seeking a precarious sanctuary in the sky.
In reply, the black loci of Calmissiles descended in silence, consuming air and X-ray lasers with equal serenity, until they punched through the Deliverance ships, eviscerating the wreckage.
Even though Loi had been at most of the Knockdown meetings and knew the plan by heart, watching the numbers wind up was unnerving. The cruisers were expending munitions at a phenomenal rate, and he was keenly aware of the reserves. They’d pushed manufacturing stations to the maximum in order to be ready for today, but even so it was going to be tight.
The Knockdown tactical display splashed the cruisers above Utah, closing to their optimal attack points. Deliverance ships around Salt Lake City responded to their approach by firing at the gathering above. Missiles began to streak down in retaliation, slicing incandescent lines through the crud-clotted air.
Three command icons splashed green.
‘Go,’ Johnston said.
Loi started moving towards portal five. It took time to get up to a run, even with all the artificial muscle the suit was packing; that much inertia couldn’t be overcome easily. When he and Eldlund had been practising in the suits, they’d found the best way to stop when you were sprinting was just to drop to the ground, then dig your knees and elbows in to bulldoze through dirt until you halted.
He’d reached a reasonable jogging speed when he passed through portal five’s blue rim. His balance shifted, which the suit’s network corrected. There was an intruder synth turtle just behind his heels, squatting on the side of Mount Kessler’s steep slope in the heart of the Oquirrh range. Eldlund emerged from portal three, twenty metres to the west, with Lim following him out.
The gale pummelling the mountains was so thick with a hail of soil and stone flakes that Loi’s visual sensors couldn’t see them at all. The stones pinged off his armour, making it sound as if he was being shot with old-fashioned bullets. He kept moving forwards, sustaining his momentum despite the unstable ground. The tactical splash exposed the Olyix ships ranged across the nearby mountains. They’d emerged a kilometre from a transport ship – while two and a half kilometres beyond that, along a precarious ridge, a Deliverance ship had pulverized the top of Farnsworth Peak, creating a flattish plateau on which it had sat for the last two and a half years while it assaulted Salt Lake City’s shield.
The transports were starting to take off while the Deliverance ships were shooting upwards at the swarm of missiles hurtling down. This time it was the Calmissiles that arrived first. Their exhaust plumes were b
right enough to shine through the murky atmosphere, turning the slope into a stark monochrome wasteland. Loi could even glimpse the hulking shapes of the other two armour suits lumbering along.
Five Calmissiles punctured the Deliverance ship at Farnsworth Peak, cutting clean through and boring vertically down into the mountain until their spacial entanglement casings were switched off seconds later. By then the incandescent exhausts had already devastated the interior of the Deliverance ship. It burst apart in a cascade of molten slivers and jagged structural segments.
The glare faded, replaced by intense flashes from somewhere overhead as a fusillade of nuclear warheads detonated. Loi could just make out the shadow shape of the transport ship lifting off – a truncated-cone profile with its nose angling up as it started to accelerate. More explosions bloomed, their shockwaves crashing down in massive pressure surges. The transport ship was more than three hundred metres high when the full force of the blastwave struck. It was flung down, twisting sharply as if trying to regain its correct flight vector. Then it smashed hard into the ground. Splits multiplied along the fuselage, but it remained intact.
Loi designated the fusion chamber exhaust ports at the rear, and the suit fired a tactical missile. The warhead was only a two-decaton nuke, and it exploded twenty metres away from the ship. Still, it was powerful enough to lift half of the transport off the ground as it shunted the whole mass along. The nose crunched into a rock clump, and the fissures in the fuselage ripped wide open. The aft quarter crumpled badly, blackening as the nuke’s small mushroom cloud was immediately torn apart by the wind.
Loi crouched down. Even so, he wound up sprawling on his back as the blastwave flipped him over. Three high-velocity drones streaked forwards from Eldlund’s dispensers, hitting the transport ship’s mangled fuselage and sticking fast.
‘Entanglement suppression active,’ Eldlund exclaimed. ‘The Salvation onemind doesn’t know what’s happening to the ship.’
Loi had righted himself and was ploughing forwards as fast as he could go. The flashes from nukes overhead were coming less frequently. All part of the Knockdown strategy, allowing the remaining ships to escape to orbit.
The transport was in bad shape. Its sombre-red fuselage had so many cracks and gashes it was clearly never going to fly again. Internal tanks had been torn open. Fluids were gurgling out to splurge over structural spurs and the curving decking before splattering on the baked ground. Some of the liquid bleeding from the ship’s vitals was cryogenic, bubbling away from exposure to the hot winds, producing vigorous clouds of white vapour that veiled the deeper mysteries of the interior.
Loi switched his suit sensor array to active, and it probed clean through the clouds, exposing the layout ahead. The ship was one he was painstakingly familiar with, identical to the original design of the Avenging Heretic. Directly under the fuselage skin was a thick seam of systems to manipulate exotic matter, allowing the ship to fly through a wormhole. Gravitonic drive units and fusion generators occupied the aft quarter, now mostly mangled slag thanks to the tactical nuke he’d fired. The bulk of the ship comprised cylindrical compartments linked by overlapping circular corridors that resembled wide pipes.
He reached the ship and gripped both edges of a wide fissure. Artificial muscle cranked up to full strength, and he actually heard the grinding sound through the suit insulation as the gap was prised further apart. Then he was inside, battling to keep a decent footing on the oily fluid coating the corridor walls, while icy white vapour from the broken cryogenic tank gushed around him, blocking the visual sensors. Millimetre-wave radar delineated something moving up ahead. The splash showed him an odd profile – an octopus whose tentacles projected radially out of its body in two equidistant rings, top and bottom, with whip cables sprouting from the midsection. It was clambering towards him fast. His shoulder-mounted mag-miniguns deployed, swivelling forwards. They fired a couple of half-second bursts, producing a ferocious jackhammer vibration that made his teeth rattle. The body of the Olyix construct was immediately reduced to tattered shreds – almost the same consistency as the bubbling fluid Loi was slewing through.
Three more of the things came flailing along the corridor. He blasted each of them, then he, Eldlund and Lim arrived at the central compartment. It was a basic cylinder that ran the height of the ship, separated into three sections by simple walkway grids. Halfway up, in the centre of the walkway, was a two-metre-diameter sphere, held in place by ten radial poles. There must have been more than twenty of the Olyix creatures in there, of different sizes and varying lengths of tentacles. They were moving sluggishly as though they were drunk, and sensors didn’t see them carrying anything that resembled weapons. Loi and Eldlund opened fire. Ten seconds later, their armour suits were covered in ribbons of gore, the creatures were all dead, and the compartment’s walls had hundreds of fist-sized holes where the armour-piercing micro-harpoons had struck.
‘That makes it easy,’ Lim said. She began to scale the wall with the ease of a jazzed-up free-climber, using the holes to jam feet and hands in. If they weren’t big enough, she punched or kicked them until they were.
Loi used his suit sensors to watch the two corridors at the bottom of the compartment while Eldlund covered the three entrances at the top. The gale of cryogenic vapour had withered away, leaving everything in stark relief.
Lim reached the midsection walkway and swung onto it. If the transport ship’s onemind was alarmed at her presence, there was no physical sign of it. But Loi kept vigilant as the blood fizzing around his body turned to pure adrenalin. So Great-Grandfather Ainsley’s paranoia is hereditary, after all.
The tactical splash showed him that the nearly two dozen Olyix transport ships around Salt Lake City were now airborne. The surviving pair of Deliverance ships was lifting with them, their energy beams cutting apart the last barrage of missiles. Two hundred kilometres above them, a formation of cruisers swept eastwards, with a second formation following fifteen hundred kilometres behind. The gap between them was the one that the Olyix ships were aiming for. After two years analysing the flight capabilities of the transport ships, Strikeback had determined that over fifty per cent should be able to make it through that gap and continue to climb.
‘Starting extraction now,’ Lim announced.
Loi’s suit sensors zoomed in. Lim had placed a glossy black package on the surface of the sphere, next to one of the radial spokes. Its surface rippled as if it was composed of a particularly viscous liquid.
This was the part they were completely dependent on the Neána for. The aliens were the ones with the neurovirus, which they claimed couldn’t be used by humans. They had to rely on Lim and Jessika. Loi wanted to believe they’d pull through, but Kandara’s suspicions kept playing in his mind. So much had to be taken on trust. Our survival.
Lim’s gauntlet split open, and she pushed her right hand into the black surface and kept on going up to her wrist. ‘I’m in,’ she announced.
Loi scanned the corridors again. Nothing moved along them. He began to wonder what was in the other compartments. They’d never explored, never dispatched mobile sensors. This was a single-target mission – the most important one on Earth. Everything else was set up to facilitate this.
All Lim had to do was interface with the organic neural processor housed inside the sphere and load the neurovirus into it. Loi couldn’t help it; he began to draw up size comparisons. Even if the mass of the neural processors only took up half of the sphere, it would still be seven or eight times larger than Lim’s brain. So they didn’t just have to trust that the Neána were true allies; the neurovirus had to work perfectly as well – something that had been assembled in a Neána abode cluster unknown centuries ago, and probably longer than that. Which made him wonder how they knew so much about Olyix thought routines. Did they have captives they’d experimented on? That goes right against their supposed philosophy of hiding between the stars.
Soćko had promised them it would work. ‘I took out a tra
nsport ship’s onemind with it, remember?’
‘Got it!’ Lim exclaimed. She withdrew her hand carefully, and the gauntlet sealed up again. The surface of the package bowed inwards, then it flowed into the sphere as if it was being sucked in.
This part had always seemed the weirdest to Loi. The neurovirus had allowed Lim to copy the onemind’s identity patterns. But for the Avenging Heretic’s flight to succeed, they needed the specialist nodule of cells deep inside the transport ship’s neural processor, which were entangled with the Salvation of Life’s neuralstratum. If the armour suit wasn’t so heavy, he’d be tapping his feet with nervous impatience.
The black package emerged back out from the hole, and Lim plucked it off the sphere. Thirty seconds later she’d half clambered, half jumped back to the floor of the compartment.
‘Let’s go.’
‘Hallelujah!’ Eldlund exclaimed.
They hurried out, Eldlund taking point. Loi dropped a ten-decaton nuke on the compartment’s floor as he stepped into the corridor, set the timer for ten minutes, and didn’t look back.
It took them seven minutes to lope back to the portals. They were back on Kruse Station when the nuke detonated, obliterating what remained of the transport ship and any evidence of the Knockdown mission.
The Avenging Heretic
S-Day, 11th December 2206
The five of them sat at their consoles in the white oval bridge, watching the image suspended between them. The Avenging Heretic’s internal sensors showed them an engineering drone holding the black extraction package Lim had brought back from the Knockdown mission, lowering it carefully into an open white cylinder.
The Saints of Salvation [British Ed.] Page 15
