Pandora's Star cs-2

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Lennie Al Husan had arrived at the Anshun CST station after a two-hour rail journey that was supposed to take forty-eight minutes. It always happened when he routed through StLincoln; there was always a delay in that station yard. So he was late for his appointment with the starship project’s media office. His editor was going to play hell over that, every media company was trying to get an angle on the flight. Lennie even dreamily entertained the idea he might somehow qualify as one of the reporter/crewmembers, a post that the CST kept dangling in front of media representatives to ensure favorable cooperation.

  Except this delay had probably blown that option.

  He made his way along the main concourse to the transport holding area for the starship complex. There were a couple of extensive security checks, then he was outside in the wretchedly humid air, joining several other people milling about waiting for a bus. He asked his e-butler to contact the media officer he’d been dealing with.

  “I’m having trouble establishing an interface to the datasphere,” the e-butler told him. “Kaos software is contaminating the local datanet nodes.”

  “Really?” Lennie looked around with interest, which was a stupid thing to do, he acknowledged. But kaos attacks were rare, and usually preceded or covered some kind of criminal activity.

  A crashing sound so loud he assumed it was an explosion reverberated over the transport holding area. Along with everyone else in the queue, Lennie hit the ground. For a second he thought it was a derailment, however impossible that was. Then a roaring sound began. Mingling with that was a second crash. Lennie got up, and tried to work out where the barrage was coming from; it was now so loud he had to jam his hands over his ears.

  “Full record, all senses,” he told his e-butler. He started running to the end of the long building. As he rounded the corner he got a view out over a wide section of the marshaling yard. First impression was that a lengthy train of covered wagons parked behind the cargo handling sheds was breaking apart. Two of the wagons were already reduced to scraps of junk. As he watched, a third burst open. Huge dark metal shapes were rising out of the debris on vivid columns of violet flame. They looked like armored rectangular dinosaurs, with blunt wedge-shaped heads. Thick cannon barrels jutted out from where their eyes should have been, while smaller guns protruded from the front of the head, like lethal mandibles. Three stumpy legs were folded back against each side of their flanks as they went airborne. The air shimmered around them as force fields came on.

  Lennie didn’t dare blink. He kept his eyes wide, holding them steady, absorbing the glorious sight. His e-butler was sending out a multitude of pings, searching out a cybersphere node clear of contamination.

  “Let us in!” Lennie screamed at the collapsing cybersphere. “I command you in Allah’s name, for fuck’s sake. Let us in!”

  Then the kaos contamination suddenly vanished, emptying out of the cybersphere like water draining down a pipe. Everything was on-line, and Lennie’s images were shooting into his office array back on Kabul.

  “The SI has cleaned the local network,” his e-butler told him; there might have been a small note of awe in the program construct’s artificial voice. Lennie didn’t care if it was the glorious Prophet Himself who’d returned to work the electronic miracle. It was him who was channeling the images, and the sound, and the terror out across the Commonwealth—he: Lennie Al Husan. This was his show.

  The three horrific machines swung around in unison; their exhaust jets vectored horizontal and they accelerated away over the station’s wilderness yard. “They’re Alamo Avengers,” Lennie shouted into the howl of the rockets, praying his audience would be able to hear. “You’re seeing real-live Alamo Avengers in action.” He just managed to fight down the impulse to cheer them on.

  The two guards left sitting in the gatehouse were just starting to wonder where Rob had got to when their standard cybersphere connections went down. They weren’t unduly concerned, they still had their secure links to the sensors and perimeter systems. Two alerts came in on the line from the security command center. Before they even looked at them properly, an explosion behind them sent a fireball roiling up into the sky from the far side of the complex. Red circles were springing up all across their security status display.

  “God, that was a generator,” one managed to say as flames billowed up after the expanding fireball. “Looks like the whole fuel storage section went up with it.”

  Three floors of windows in one of the towers erupted, a million spinning splinters of glass surfing out on huge gouts of flame.

  “Security command center not responding,” the gatehouse array reported. “You now have autonomous control of perimeter security.”

  “Seal it!” the senior guard shouted. He loaded his pattern code into the gatehouse array, watching the protective systems come to life. The guardbots halted where they were; hatches opened down the sides of their bodywork, and weapons deployed, locking into ready positions. More reassuringly, the force field generators came on; triplicated and self-powered, they erected a huge dome-shape shield over the entire complex. Air molecules trapped inside the bonding effect sparkled as they absorbed the energy input, aligning themselves into a rigid lattice.

  A further two explosions went off inside the complex. The senior guard tried to work out what was being destroyed. His status display was almost devoid of information.

  “What do we do?” his partner demanded.

  “Just sit tight. We can’t turn off the force field, we don’t have that authority. We’re safe in here.”

  “No we’re bloody not.” The guard pointed frantically at the huge flames and black smoke rising over the complex’s buildings. “We’re locked in with a bunch of goddamn terrorists.”

  “Don’t panic. They just caught us by surprise. The whole place is going to seal up tighter than a lagoon onna’s ass now. Look.” He pointed at one of the towers. Its outer surface was cloaked in the telltale sparkle of a force field. “Isolate them and bring in the big guns to mop them up: standard procedure.” He turned around to see his partner was completely ignoring the complex, instead he was squinting out across the barren expanse of the station yard.

  “What the hell are those?”

  It had gone down right to the wire, but the maintenance tech had interfaced all his arrays into the gateway control room network. The RI had been locked out.

  “They can’t alter the gateway coordinate,” he said triumphantly. “I’ve isolated the command network, so the system’s fallen back on its internal arrays. Everything will just keep ticking over nicely.”

  “Great,” Rob sneered. “What about when they cut the power?” He’d already felt the floor tremble slightly. There’d definitely been an explosion nearby. Some other part of the operation was moving forward. He wished it weren’t so compartmentalized; it was hard not knowing what was happening.

  The tech gave him a contemptuous look. He sat down behind the console he’d mutilated, and called up new schematics on the large wall-mounted portals. “They already have, look. The grid supply is just about zero. We’re already running off the niling d-sink. Everything’s okay. We just have to hold out for another thirty minutes.”

  Rob’s e-butler suddenly reported it could connect to the room’s cybersphere nodes. Half a dozen calls were incoming, demanding his identity. “Tell them to fuck off,” he ordered the e-butler.

  “That’s funny,” the tech said. His eyes were unfocused as he studied the data within his virtual vision. “The cybersphere is clear, someone countered the kaos software, it got flushed out.”

  “Is that good or bad?” Rob asked.

  “It’s strange. I’d never guessed Anshun’s cybersphere RI was powerful enough to extinguish that level of kaos so quickly.”

  “How does it affect us?” Rob demanded. He always hated working with these specialist nerds, they never appreciated the physical side of any mission.

  “It doesn’t, really. I mean, CST security can’t physically get in h
ere, or the chamber with the gateway machinery—we control that force field as well.” He scratched at the side of his face. “It might make it a little tougher for us to exit at the end if all their sensors are back on-line. Let me think about that.”

  Rob glanced at the other guard, who simply shrugged.

  “Oh, wait,” the tech said. He leaned forward as one of the portals switched to a grainy image from a sensor covering the corridor directly outside the control room. “Here we go, they got the lift circuit back.” The sensor showed the lift door closing. Ten seconds later, the remote charge detonated. All Rob saw on the portal image was the lift doors quaking, the central join split apart as the metal buckled. A dense cloud gushed out into the corridor. It was dust, not smoke, Rob realized.

  The other guard chuckled. “They’ll never get down that way now, the whole shaft must have collapsed.”

  Rob glanced at the metal slab covering the fire door. Security would be down the stairwell that connected to it soon enough. According to the instructions he decrypted that morning, once the lift shaft was out of action they’d be able to leave the control room by the main door. One of the offices off the corridor outside had a utility passage that would take them to the chamber containing the gateway machinery. After that, they had a choice of three exit routes once the force field was switched off. Of course, that had all rather depended on the cybersphere and security sensors being knocked out by kaos.

  “Can anyone see in here right now?” Rob asked. He searched around the ceiling for sensors and cameras. There were at least three covering the room.

  “Let me review the local network,” the tech said. He suddenly froze, and gaped at the portal displaying the gateway command network. One section was flashing red. “No way,” he whispered.

  “What?” Rob demanded.

  “The first routing lockout fireshield. It’s down.”

  “Once more, in English!”

  “Look, the actual fiber-optic cables which carry the network, they’re still intact, still integrated with the local datanet, which in turn is connected to the cybersphere. But the nodes, where the routing is controlled, that’s where I loaded my software in to block contact. In electronic terms, there’s no physical barrier between us and the outside, only the fireshields. I erected five, in sequence, at each node, blocking every channel in, and something just got through the outer one.”

  “You told us the Anshun RI cleaned out the kaos,” the other guard said.

  “No, I said I didn’t think it could, not that quickly. Jesus!” Another section of the gateway command network was flashing amber. “This isn’t possible, I swear: not possible.”

  “Another fireshield?” Rob guessed.

  “It’s going to fall, oh man, half the format codes have been cracked already. No way. I mean no fucking way! Do you know what kind of encryption I used for that thing? Eighty-dimensional geometry. Eighty! That should take like a century to break, if you’re lucky.” He seemed more angry than worried by the event.

  Rob was starting to get a real bad feeling about the mission. “So what can crack that kind of encryption?”

  The tech became very still. “The SI.” His gaze found a ceiling camera that was lined up on his console, and he looked straight into the tiny lens. “Oh, shit.”

  The other guard brought up his ion pistol, and started shooting the cameras. “Find out how many sensors there are in here. Now!”

  Rob took a shot at a sensor above the main door. He risked a quick look at the portal display as he hunted around for more. The amber warning over the second fireshield was shading into a more ominous red.

  The senior gatehouse guard stared out through the window, his lower jaw sagging open as the true nature of the flying objects became apparent. “I’ve seen those things before,” he croaked. “I know what they are. They were on an action drama I accessed years ago. Alamo Avengers. But they’re ancient history.”

  “Not anymore,” his partner said. “What do we do?”

  “Pray.”

  All along the highway to the starship complex, vehicles had halted automatically as the kaos software corrupted their drive arrays. Then when the explosions began and the force field dome came on, people got out to stand on the hot tarmac to watch the spectacle. Several turned as the new sound rumbled up behind them, only to fling themselves down, screaming a warning.

  The Alamo Avengers stormed over the highway at barely a hundred meters altitude. When they were a kilometer from the force field, they opened fire with their particle lances. It was as if sheet lightning was bridging the gap between them and the dome. The entire sky transformed into a blinding white maelstrom as the air disintegrated from the tremendous energy discharge. The sound blast alone shattered every window on the cars and vans and buses below; people were hurled about by the sonic wavefront. Ears and eyes ruptured, capillaries tore apart; blood started to foam out of their mouths and noses and ears, unprotected skin liquefied.

  The force field dome maintained its integrity under the strike. Right across its surface, air molecules collapsed and punched upward in a seething coronal cloud. From above, it looked as though a small red dwarf sun had become buried in the ground. Huge lightning bolts spun outward from the seething ion cloak, lashing against the surrounding earth. Guardbots, waiting alertly along the base of the force field, their lasers and magnetic rifles tracking the incoming enemy, simply detonated into fragment swarms that vaporized in microseconds as the energy cascade engulfed them. Every scrap of vegetation within four hundred meters of the perimeter burst into flame.

  All three Alamo Avengers fired again, concentrating their lances on a single point. Again, the force field resisted, deflecting the terrible energy deluge back out into the tortured coruscating air. Thick cataracts of lightning ripped out, pummeling the ground.

  Inside the gatehouse, both guards had dived to the floor at the first barrage. Their entire world vanished in a violent whiteout. Even inside the force field, the noise was tremendous, translating into direct physical pain stabbing in through their eardrums. When the light died down, they risked looking up. Five hundred meters away, where the lances had been targeted, a huge patch of the force field was still ablaze with radiant violet streamers as residual energy swirls grounded out.

  “It held,” the senior guard grunted in disbelief. He couldn’t hear what he’d just said. When he put his hand up to his ear, his fingers came away sticky with blood. He didn’t care. “I’m alive.” The back of his knuckles smeared tears across his cheeks. “Oh, sweet Jesus, I’m alive.”

  When he raised his head above the desktop he could see the Alamo Avengers approaching the force field dome. Pitiful fires sputtered below them as the last of the weeds and grass were consumed. They didn’t so much land, as fall out of the air. Their rockets cut off while they were still twenty meters up. Legs stretched out, and absorbed the impact, leaving them in a crouching position on the blackened smoldering earth. The head on the nearest one swung slowly from side to side in mockery of a living creature, scanning its sensors back and forth. Their arrays were loaded with animal-sentient smartware, giving them an independence fueled only by aggression; once their target was loaded in, they wouldn’t stop until it had been reached.

  The lead Alamo Avenger lurched forward, legs thudding heavily as they moved with a speed unnerving for something so massive. Plumes of soot and dirt shot up from each impact, flowing in strange swirls around its own force field. Small sections of armor along the front edge of its head flipped up, allowing long black prongs to slide out. The medium-caliber weapons barrels retracted back into their bays. At thirty meters from the base of the dome, it stopped and lowered its thick wedge head. The prongs flared with a cobalt nimbus that spun and flickered. It thrust them down into the ground. Huge geysers of soil were flung up into the air. The Alamo Avenger braced its legs, shoving its head deeper into the hole that the prongs were gouging out. Sand and shards of fractured rock were shooting twenty meters into the air above it. Sl
owly, it began to ease its huge armored body down into the excavation.

  Every building on Leithpool’s Castle Mount was illuminated by bright beams of light, their colors gracefully morphing through the spectrum; while above them all, the bold fairy-tale castle itself was drenched in the brilliance of thirty solar-bright searchlights. From his position in the curving window of the Prince’s Circle café, Adam had a superb view of the resplendent rock against the backdrop of a serenely clear night. Its reflection shivered across the cold black waters of Leithpool’s circular lake in a near-perfect mirror image. Like all the other late-evening denizens of the café, he’d stopped looking at the view several minutes ago. Unisphere news shows were all featuring the events on Anshun, as were thousands of media companies stretched across the Commonwealth. The café had switched to Alessandra Baron; although even the images she had access to lacked professionalism, they came from the survivors of broken or abandoned vehicles on the highway to the starship complex. Retinal inserts were relaying the sight; the pictures blurry from tears, wobbling as the senders shook from fear or relief.

  They showed the Alamo Avengers digging their way underneath the force field dome. There was actually little now to see of the ancient war machines themselves, the holes that they had dug were deep enough to contain the main bulk of their bodies. Huge sprays of earth were still fountaining up into the sky, to fall as a concealing cloud of dust and fractured stone granules dryer than any desert sand. The volume of dirt they vomited out behind them never slackened. At the speed they were going it could only be a matter of minutes before they were underneath the complex itself. It was a point that Alessandra Baron, safe in her studio on Augusta, was keen to point out. She did confess that she knew nothing of the defense capabilities that CST may or may not have built into the complex, although the standard ones didn’t seem to have held out very well so far. Also chosen for emphasis was the legend of just how destructive the Alamo Avengers were.