“Very well.”
“The Cox Educational charity helped fund Dr. Bose’s observation. How much did they give him?”
“In total, one point three million Earth dollars, spread over eleven years.”
“Where does their money come from?”
“It is a private charity.”
“What does that mean?”
“The source of the money is not open to inspection.”
“Okay, so who runs it?”
“The registered commissioners are three lawyers, Ms. Daltra, Mr. Pomanskie, and Mr. Seeton, who all work for Bromley, Waterford, and Granku, a New York legal firm.”
“Humm.” She ran a sponge along her legs. “What else does the Cox support?”
“It contributed to over a hundred universities and colleges across the Commonwealth. Do you want the list?”
“Not right now.”
“Would you like the total amount of money given to the other institutions.”
She opened her eyes, suddenly very interested—it wasn’t like the SI to volunteer information. “Yes please.”
“Seventy thousand Earth dollars.”
“For each one?”
“No. That is the total payout.”
“Hell. How long has it been going for?”
“Fourteen years. It shut down two years after Dudley Bose observed the envelopment. Six months after Paula Myo interviewed Dudley Bose.”
“So, most hated man in the Commonwealth,” Carys said with a taunting smile. “Quite a title. As voted for on the Maxis unisphere poll. Never guessed my little nephew would be so famous.”
Mark just grunted in response, and wormed down deeper into his favorite chair. They were all sitting around in the living room, giving Carys a taste of last year’s Ulon Valley wine before lunch.
“Nobody here cares,” he said. “It’s not important.”
“Oh, yes. It’s only relevant to us, isn’t it. Us, being decadent metropolitan types practicing our intellectual snobbery over you poor country bumpkins.”
Mark shrugged, smiling. “You said it.”
“Wake up and smell the coffee,” she snapped. “The media is going to screw your beautiful little town into the bedrock: I know from my contacts that Alessandra Baron is already planning a follow up. Have you tried booking a skiing holiday here for this next season? I did. They’re offering fifty percent discounts already. Nobody’s coming.”
“And you can fix all that, can you?”
Carys exchanged a glance with Liz. “You need some serious PR, Mark. And I’m the only expert you’ve got.”
“You called her!” Mark accused Liz.
“You have to listen to somebody, baby. Everyone around here is being very careful not to lay any blame. To your face.”
He turned to Carys, appealing. “I never said it the way that interview came out. They edited me to make it sound bad.”
“The technical term is raunching up,” Carys said. “They always do it. We can use that to fight back.”
“How?” he said suspiciously.
“I can get you interviewed on other shows. Live studio interviews, so they can’t mess with your message. You’ll need a lot of coaching before we let you on, and you’ll have to grow a decent sense of humor. But it can be done.”
“I’ve got a sense of humor,” he protested indignantly.
Carys opened her mouth to answer. There was a bright flash outside. Mark and Liz frowned in unison. There were no thunderclouds anywhere.
Out in the garden, Sandy was squealing as if she were in pain. Both parents jumped up and went through the open patio doors.
“What’s the matter, poppet?” Mark asked.
Panda was going berserk, barking, jumping up and down. Sandy ran to her mother, arms flung wide. “In the sky,” she wailed. “My eyes hurt. I see purple.”
Mark’s wrist array crashed. The sky to the southeast turned dazzling white. “Damn, what the hell…” All the autopickers had stopped. As had the tractors. Every bot he could see was motionless and silent.
The smear of silky light above the mountains was draining away to leave the normal blue sky in its wake. Then a vivid rose-gold sun climbed up from behind the peaks, its surface writhing with webs of black fire. It cast long moving shadows across the ground.
“Oh, my God,” Liz murmured.
The new sun was rising on a stalk of brilliant raging flame. All the remaining snow on the Regents vaporized in a single violent white explosion. The tops of the mountains looked as if they were vibrating. They started to crumble just as the ferocious vapor cloud swarmed around them, obliterating them from sight.
Sandy’s shrieks reached a crescendo.
“They nuked it,” Mark shouted in awe. “They nuked the detector station.” He watched the mushroom cloud swelling out, its color darkening, deepening as it spread its bruised perimeter across the clean sky. Then the sound blast reached them.
Mellanie ordered a light salad from room service before dressing in jeans and a coal-black sweatshirt from her own fashion line. She tied her hair back in a simple loose tail, just using moisturizer on her face, no makeup. It was important she looked serious for this call.
One of the scowling housemaids brought the salad while Dudley was splashing about cheerfully in the bathroom. She spent a couple of minutes clearing up the mess that was the two breakfast trays. Mellanie gave her a twenty-dollar tip. If anything the scowl was deeper when she left.
“Double screw you,” Mellanie told the door.
She picked at the salad for a while, sorting out the pitch in her mind, then sat at the bureau and used the room’s desktop array to place a call to Alessandra.
Alessandra’s image appeared on the array’s screen. She was sitting in the green room’s makeup chair, a paper bib around her neck to protect her fabulous dress. “Where the hell have you been?” she demanded.
“I’m on Elan.”
“Okay, in that case I’ll let you live. As it is, you’re this close to being fired.” She held her hand up, thumb and forefinger almost touching. “Don’t ever put a block on your unisphere address code again. Now: I need your follow-up report in an hour. And it better be a prize-winner, or that tiny little arse of yours will reach orbit.”
“I’m on to something.”
“What?”
Mellanie took a breath. “Paula Myo thinks the Starflyer is real.”
“You’re fucking unbelievable, you know that? I give you every chance, more than I’ve given anybody else, and not just because you’re good in bed. And this drivel is what you come up with?”
“Listen! She put me on to Dudley Bose.”
“Do you know where he is? Everybody in the biz is going apeshit trying to find him.”
“I’ve been fucking him for information, yeah.” She tossed her head, keeping her face expressionless as she looked at Alessandra’s image. “And like you say, I’m very good at it. I found something out.”
“All right, darling, have your fifteen seconds of fame. What have you got?”
“One of the charities that funded Bose’s observation of the Dyson Pair is a front organization. The Starflyer arranged for us to see the envelopment. It wanted us to investigate the barrier.”
“Proof?” Alessandra snapped.
“The charity had secret bank account funding,” she said, hoping to God it was slightly true, but she had to get Alessandra behind the investigation. “I checked through all its other donations; they’re tokens, validity in case anyone ran a quick review. And it was shut down right after the discovery. But the important thing is that Myo knew this years ago. Don’t you see what that means? All these years she never caught Johansson and Elvin, she knew all along. She might even be working with the Guardians!”
“This is your vendetta,” Alessandra said.
Mellanie could see the uncertainty, and pressed on doggedly. “But it will be your story. Give me a research team, let me work it. Hell, take charge of a research team yourself. That�
��s what Myo’s telling us. Us, the media. This is all public source information, verifiable if you know where to look. We can prove the Starflyer exists. For God’s sake, Wendy Bose actually met Bradley Johansson! Did that ever come out in any interview? This is real, Alessandra, I promise.”
“I want to talk to Bose.”
“Okay.”
The SI’s icon sprang up in Mellanie’s virtual vision. “Get on the floor behind the bed,” it told her.
“What?”
“The navy detector network is registering wormholes emerging inside the Commonwealth,” the SI said. “The Regents detector station is under attack. Get behind the bed, it will provide some cover.”
“Mellanie?” Alessandra asked, frowning.
“I’ve got to go,” she hesitated, not really believing. Then her virtual vision showed inserts coming on-line, activated by the SI. They were systems she neither recognized nor understood.
“We will try and remain in contact with you,” the SI said.
“Mellanie, there’s some kind of alert—” Alessandra said; her voice had risen in alarm.
Mellanie dived for the bed. There was a brilliant flash in the sky outside.
Wilson was alone in his awful white-glowing office, waiting for people to arrive for the second management meeting of the morning, the one on ship production scheduling and subcomponent delivery supervision. The override priority call that came in from the planetary defense division made him sit upright in his chair as it delivered big emergency icons to his virtual vision. The wormhole detector network was picking up unidentified quantum signatures inside Commonwealth space. Wormholes were opening in several star systems.
The office began to dim, scarlet and sapphire digits slipped along the ceiling and down the walls as emerald graphics flowered across the floor. The projections stabilized, arching out into the air to place Wilson at the center of a tactical star chart. He was close to the boundary of the Commonwealth, where phase three space dwindled away into galactic night. Twenty-three star systems were encircled by amber icons, with small script windows full of digits and icons.
“Twenty-three wormholes?” he murmured in dismay. The navy only had three functional warships, and eight scoutships refitted as missile carriers. Then the dataflow increased, clarifying the information coming in from the detector network. Forty-eight separate wormholes had opened in each of the twenty-three star systems, bringing the total to over eleven hundred. That was about the same number of gateways operated by CST itself. “Son of a bitch.” He couldn’t believe the numbers, he who’d been to Dyson Alpha and seen the scale of the Prime civilization for himself.
More information was pouring through now, complementing the navy network. The cyberspheres on Anshun, Belembe, Martaban, Balkash, and Samar were already suffering huge glitches and area crashes. Reports of explosions were coming in from the government systems of those planets, in almost every case corresponding to electronic failure zones. Twenty-three translucent globes expanded into Wilson’s image, representing the planets under attack. Detailed imagery was hard to find for any of them. Land survey satellites, geosynchronous relay platforms, industrial stations, and high inclination meteorological sensors were being systematically blasted out of orbit. Wormholes appeared as bright scarlet diamonds poised over the planets. They winked in and out of existence, changing position by the minute to avoid sensor lock. Radar tracked high-velocity projectiles flying out of them at each emergence.
The navy was losing contact with its detector stations on Elan, Whalton, Pomona, and Nattavaara, all planets in phase three space with relatively small populations. One by one the stations were dropping off the network, reducing the resolution in the display. No stations at all had survived on Molina, Olivenza, Kozani, and Balya, phase three worlds that weren’t even open to general settlement yet.
Anna materialized beside him, a ghostly gray outline. It was as if they were both on their acceleration couches back on the Second Chance again. “They started with nukes!” she said, aghast.
“We know how they fight battles,” he said, deliberately harsh, numbing himself to what all the display graphics really meant. With her there it was easier to haul back on his own emotions. He was the commander, he had to keep calm and analytical, to suppress that small part of himself that wanted to run out of the office and head for the hills. “Get Columbia into the command circuit. And find our ship positions for me.”
“All of them?” There was a lot of bitterness in the question.
“Do it!” His own hands were busy pulling planetary government civil defense data out of the unisphere. Little blue lights appeared on the twenty-three planet representations: cities with force fields. On the four start-up worlds, only the CST stations were protected.
Rafael Columbia came on-line, appearing on the other side of Wilson from Anna. “There are so many,” he said, and for once even he sounded intimidated and uncertain. “We’re launching combat aerobots now. They should provide some interceptor coverage against those projectiles, but only around major population centers. Damnit, we should have built ten times this many.”
“Get every working city force field up,” Wilson told him. “And not just on these twenty-three worlds. There’s no guarantee this is the limit of the invasion. Use the planetary cyberspheres to issue a mass warning, I want people to get under cover. That’s a start.”
“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 communications 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 despin procedure, eliminating the problem of precession, which had been screwing up their maneuvering 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 kilometers above Anshun’s nightside equator, and curving around 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 barred her teeth in fury at the devastation. For her the light was carefully color-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 toward 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, straining the force fields 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 kilometers 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 around 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 warheads. 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.
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