Pandora's Star cs-2

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Plasma drives,” Mellanie screamed above the never-ending thunderclap. “Those are ships coming down.”

  The second tumor of cloud ripped open as it was lanced by eight more incandescent spears. Mellanie finally had to cover her eyes, turning the image to a single bloodred haze as her hand came close to translucent. Even through the lashing rain, the heat pouring out of the plasma was greater than any noonday desert sun. The raindrops were steaming as they bulleted through the air.

  There was a slight decrease in the light level. Mellanie brought her hand down. A ship had descended out of the clouds, a dark cone shape riding the vivid glare of its rigid plasma exhausts. Then it vanished behind the massive wall of radiant steam gushing up from the lake.

  “Did you see that?” Mellanie screamed raw-throated. “They’re coming.”

  “Get out of there.” Eighty billion accessors saw Alessandra’s poise crack. “Don’t compromise your safety: run.”

  “We can’t…” The image vanished in a scattering of purple static.

  Alessandra froze behind the desk. She cleared her throat. “That report from Mellanie Rescorai, one of the most promising and talented newcomers to join our team for several years. The prayers from all of us here in the studio are with her. And now, over to Garth West, who was covering the flower festival on Sligo. What’s it like there, Garth, any sign of Prime landing ships, yet?”

  “Ships now approaching upper atmosphere on Anshun, Elan, Whalton, Pomona, and Nattavaara,” Anna reported in a calm voice.

  As the Prime ships reached the stratosphere, aerobots started shooting. Everyone sharing Wilson’s tactical display watched intently as the energy weapons locked on and sliced upward. They had little effect. Wilson heard a couple of dismayed curses. The force fields protecting the descending ships were too powerful to penetrate with the medium-caliber weaponry carried by the aerobots. Then the Primes began targeting the small aggressors below them.

  “Get them out of there,” Wilson said. “Regroup them around the protected cities. We’ll need them later.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Rafael said.

  “Did we hit any of them?” Nigel asked.

  “No, sir,” Anna said. “Not one; their force fields are too strong.”

  “Atmospheric entry on Belembe, Martaban, Sligo, Balkash, Samar, Molina, and Kozani. They’re coming through the wormholes at the rate of one per forty seconds. Trajectories variable, they’re not concentrating on the capital cities. They seem to be heading for coastlines.”

  “Coastlines?”

  “Getting visual imagery.”

  Various image feeds appeared in the huge tactical display, each one showing pictures of brilliant streamers cutting across skies of varying colors.

  “They’re big bastards,” Rafael commented. “Thousands of tons each.”

  “Those are fusion plumes,” Tunde Sutton said. “Temperature profile and spectral signature indicate a deuterium reaction.”

  “Confirm, they’re heading for water landings,” Anna said.

  “Makes sense,” Nigel said. “Even with force fields I wouldn’t like to land one of those on solid ground.”

  “That gives us a breathing space,” Wilson said. “They’re going to have to come ashore. And it will be in smaller vehicles. We might be able to get some reinforcements to the capitals and the larger towns.”

  “Last aerobots squadrons are being withdrawn from range,” Anna said.

  “Our reinforcement is taking too much time,” Rafael said. “Anybody who has any kind of military capability is reluctant to let go of it.”

  “Get your office working on that,” Wilson told the President. “We have to show people we can put up a coherent resistance.”

  “I’ll talk to Patricia.”

  “You’ll need to lean on heads of state personally,” Nigel said.

  “Very well.” If Doi resented the bullying she didn’t show it.

  “How about the evacuation?” Wilson asked.

  “We’re already running trains from Anshun, Martaban, Sligo, Nattavaara, and Kozani,” Nigel said. “I’m shunting them through Wessex directly to Earth. After that they’ll get allocated a final destination, all I’m concerned about is getting them clear of their origin. We’re about ready to try shutting the Trusbal gateway on Wessex and reopening it in Bitran on Sligo; there’s a lot of flower festival tourists trapped there.”

  “Any Prime ships near there?” Wilson asked.

  “Twelve on their way,” Anna said. “But Bitran is a hundred thirty kilometers from the coast. There should be time.”

  For the next thirty minutes Wilson watched the shifting data in his display, showing him the flow of military equipment and personnel converging on Wessex. CST staff and the SI eventually managed to get the wormhole open and stable inside the Bitran force fields. Refugees stormed through on foot and in every vehicle the city had. They then became a problem for Wessex’s Narrabri station workforce, which had to direct them onto passenger trains to move them along. The sheer volume of people appearing so far away from any passenger terminus was completely outside any of the planetary station’s contingency plans. Eventually they cleared a set of rails, cordoning them off with caution holograms, and hustled everyone along the six kilometers to the nearest platform. Trains hurtled by on either side of them. Empty carriages going to the assaulted worlds; badly overcrowded carriages racing back. Cargo trains loaded with aerobots and armed troops from all over the Commonwealth, hurrying to reinforce the isolated cities.

  As the CST managers and the SI managed to divert more gateway wormholes to the evacuation effort, so the marshaling yard turned into an ad hoc staging post. Cargo trains pulled up in sidings, and the aerobots they carried launched from there to fly through the wormholes above the heads of the refugees. Platoons of troops in bulky armor marched along, earning appreciative cheers and applause.

  The first main effort was directed at Anshun’s capital, Treloar. Wilson wanted it kept intact with a functioning station so that aerobots could be channeled through and deployed around Anshun’s remaining shielded cities. Squadrons from thirty-five worlds were assigned to it, their arrival scheduled as fast as CST’s struggling rail network could deliver them.

  As the first ones arrived in Treloar they flew through temporary gaps in the force field and started to spread out toward the coast. Two hundred Prime ships had already splashed down on Anshun and over a thousand more were in various stages of descent. Wilson didn’t like to think what effect that would have on the planet’s already-reeling environment. But then he’d seen Dyson Alpha’s sole habitable world and the fusion ships that swirled constantly above it. The Primes didn’t have the same priorities as humans.

  “Scouts launching from Treloar,” Anna reported. “The Primes have landed just off a coastal town called Scraptoft. That’s sixty kilometers away. Should be getting pictures any minute.”

  Wilson turned to the video display relayed from the lead scout as it left Treloar. It was flying at Mach nine, its pilot array holding it steady twenty meters above the ground. Behind it, a swath of soil a hundred meters wide was being ruptured by its furious wake, the torn air pulverizing trees, bushes, plants, and the occasional building it flew over. As it neared the shoreline hundreds of small stealthed sensor drones were ejected from the fuselage, building up a much wider image.

  When it shot out over the cliff at Scraptoft, it revealed thirty Prime ships floating on the sea amid a dense swirl of agitated steam. The big cones were almost completely black, surrounded by sparkling force fields. Halfway up each superstructure, tall doorways had hinged outward to form horizontal platforms. Smaller craft were flying out of the openings, squat gray cylinders with metallic beetle legs folded up underneath. Three energy beams struck the scout, and the image vanished immediately.

  The stealthed sensors scattered behind the scout watched the Prime flyers slide in over the sea, mapping their electrical, thermal, magnetic, and mechanical structure, along with their w
eapon and force field parameters. There were several types, some that were nothing but flying weapons platforms, while the larger ones were carrying small units of some kind that were protected by individual force fields.

  “That’s got to be them,” Nigel muttered. Even now, he was curious what they might look like. Combat aerobots screamed in toward Scraptoft at Mach twelve. Prime flyers arched around to intercept. The sky between them was ruptured by energy beams and explosions, turning to a huge patch of electrically charged gas. Lightning bolts flashed outward, clawing at the ground for kilometers around.

  Eight of the big Prime landing ships coming down through the atmosphere altered their trajectory slightly. Their fusion exhausts swept across the coastline, creating instant devastation. Soil and rock melted, flowing away from the superheated beams of plasma. Waves of thick glowing vapor spewed out, boiling high above the clouds until they were pulled apart by the jetstreams. Meters above the ground, aerobots and Prime flyers alike vectored around in high-gee maneuvers in an attempt to avoid the miasma of incendiary particles. The eight Prime landing ships were poised fifteen kilometers above Scraptoft, balanced on their drive exhausts. They started to fire their weapons, blasting the aerobots out of the sky.

  Nigel watched the tsunami of filthy smog roll across the land. It was over twenty kilometers high, and spreading wide as the eight giant ships continued to hang there with their fusion fire searing into the ground. The front engulfed Treloar’s force field, bringing an abrupt night to the city.

  Screened by the pollution, the Prime flyers began to touch down around Scraptoft’s outskirts. Stealthed sensors continued their quiet transmissions, showing what they could see through the dark oppressive vapors asphyxiating the land. A visual spectrum sensor locked on to one of the flyers that had landed in the smoldering ruins of a tourist complex. Sections of the cylindrical fuselage had opened, extending ramps. Aliens walked down, their bodies encased in suits of dark armor reinforced by force fields.

  “Taller than us,” Nigel observed dispassionately.

  “Weird walk,” Wilson replied. He was watching the creature’s four legs, the way they bent, the curving feet shaped like blunt claws. His gaze moved up the torso to the four arms; each one was holding a weapon. The top of the suit was a squat hemisphere divided into four sections, each one replicating the same sensor arrangement.

  “There’s a lot of electromagnetic activity around them,” Rafael said. “They’re communicating with each other and the flyer on a continual basis. The flyers are in contact with the landing ships, ditto the ships that are going into orbit. The signals look very similar to the ones you recorded at Dyson Alpha.”

  “Tu Lee reported that the missiles required continual guidance updates,” Tunde Sutton said.

  “Meaning what?” Rafael asked.

  “Possibly, the Prime commanders don’t allow for a lot of independence on the battlefront.”

  “Okay,” Wilson said. “Anna, have we got any electronic warfare systems we can deploy?”

  “There are several EW aerobots on the central registry.”

  “Good. Get them out there fast. Close down those links. Let’s see if that has any effect on them.”

  Randtown had finally given in to panic. As soon as the alien ships had splashed down on the Trine’ba, the vehicles parked around the bus station began to move as families headed out for the perceived safety of the valleys behind the town. Horns blared in fury, their combined racket almost as loud as the ships’ exhaust. There were collisions all along the road as they made U-turns or accelerated out from the curb where they’d been waiting.

  Mark kept glancing around at the chaos as he worked with Napo Langsal on the power supply of a bus. The two of them had almost rigged a bypass around the superconductor battery regulator.

  “They’re losing it big time,” Mark grunted.

  The queue for the bus had turned into a violent scrum around the open door, shoving had deteriorated into the first fists being thrown. He and Napo were being shouted at and threatened, anything to get the bus working.

  A shotgun was fired in the center of the bus station. Everyone paused for a second. Mark had ducked immediately, now he cautiously lifted his head. It was Simon Rand who’d fired the antique pump action weapon straight into the air.

  “Thank you for your attention, ladies and gentlemen,” Simon said, his loud bass voice carrying right across the station as he turned a complete circle. Even people scrambling around the vehicles outside had paused to listen. “Nothing has changed our immediate situation, so you will stick to the plan we drew up.” He pumped the shotgun, the spent cartridge twirling away. “There are enough buses to carry everyone out, and they will leave shortly, so kindly stop harassing the engineers. Now, in order to guarantee that we can all reach the Highmarsh safely, I will require a volunteer team to stay here in town with me and act as a rear guard to allow the convoy to get a head start. Anyone with a weapon, please report to the passenger waiting lounge to receive your instructions.” He lowered the shotgun.

  “Holy Christ,” Napo grunted.

  Mark closed the cable box, and pressed the reset button. “How’s that?” he called up to the driver. The woman gave him a thumbs-up. “You get along to the next bus,” he told Napo.

  Napo gave Mark’s hunting laser a dubious glance. “He can’t make you, you know.”

  “I know.” Mark looked toward the two vast clouds of steam squatting over the Trine’ba, obscuring the ships. The surface was still reeling from their splashdown, with big waves rolling ashore, washing over the wall that ran alongside the promenade. “But he’s right. People need time to get clear.”

  Dudley Bose gave Mellanie a panicked look as they approached the bus. The crowd was pressing in tight around them, carrying them forward.

  “Do you think there’s room?” he asked. The bus already looked full, with people squashed into the seats, and more packing the aisle.

  “If not this one, then the next,” she told him. “You’ll be fine.”

  “I… ? What about you?”

  “I’ll grab a later one.” She could barely see Dudley, her virtual vision was displaying so many symbols and icons. Very little of the dataflow made any sense. She’d glimpsed some standard information amid the mad rainbow swirls, which seemed to be some kind of sensor data. Her newly activated inserts were scanning the steam clouds on the Trine’ba, analyzing the ships hidden inside. She was trying to remain aloof from it all, being a true impartial reporter, but the adrenaline flushing through her blood was making her heart pound away and giving her the shakes. The SI kept telling her to relax. It was tough; this most certainly wasn’t what she’d expected when she made her deal with it.

  “No!” Dudley cried. “No, you can’t leave me. Not now. Please, you promised.”

  “Dudley.” She put her hands on either side of his head, holding him steady, then kissed him hard amid the jostling. Concentrating on calming him was subduing her own apprehension. “I’m not going to leave you. I promised that and I’ll keep that promise. But there are things I have to do here that no one else can. Now get on the bus, and I’ll follow the convoy.”

  They’d reached the door. She let go of him, and smiled with winning reassurance. It was a truthful smile, because there was no way she was going to relinquish her hold over him for the moment; he was her ace now, making her a real player. Though given the scary abilities the SI’s inserts were providing she was beginning to wonder if she even needed Alessandra and the show anymore. She didn’t know if she could operate them independently, but just having them there was giving her a kind of courage she admitted she’d never had before. Before this, she would have been first on the bus, clawing children and little old ladies out of the way.

  The crowd pushed Dudley up the stairs, and she wriggled free. He looked back frantically as he was shoved along the aisle. “I love you,” he bellowed.

  Mellanie made herself smile at him, and blew a kiss.

  Liz and Carys
were waiting by the pickup. Mark smiled and waved at Barry and Sandy, who were in the backseat with Panda. “I’m going to help Rand,” he said. “Take Barry and Sandy up to the Highmarsh.”

  “I’m staying with you,” Liz said.

  “But—”

  “Mark, I really hope you aren’t going to come out with any crap about this being a man’s job.”

  “They need a mother.”

  “And a father.”

  “I can’t abandon Rand. This is our life they’re destroying. At the very least I owe the people this. Some of us have to get away, that’s the only way we can rebuild afterward.”

  “Agreed. And I’m helping you.”

  “Carys?” he appealed.

  “Don’t even think about involving me in this argument. But if you two crazies are going to join up with Rand’s guerrilla army I’ll take the kids out of here in the MG.” She patted a heavy bulge in her jacket. “They’ll be safe with me, I promise. And we’ve got the arrays, we can stay in touch.”

  Mark nearly questioned when his family had become gun-toting survivalists. Instead he gave Carys a quick kiss. “Thanks.” Then he and Liz had the really difficult job of coaxing the kids into the MG, promising them Mom and Dad would be following along right behind.

  Dark specks zipped out of the cloud that squatted over half of the Trine’ba. They arrowed around to line up on Randtown, accelerating hard.

  “They’re coming,” Liz called.

  Mark was backing the pickup into the Ables Motors garage workshop where it would be hidden from view. David Dunbavand was standing behind the truck, helping to guide him in with shouts and frantic hand signals. Mark had never appreciated how difficult it was to drive without micro radar providing a proximity scan.

  “That’s enough,” David said. “Let’s go.” He slipped the safety off his maser wand as they left the back of the garage. Like most buildings, it had taken a pounding in the Regents’ blast. The office along the front was missing all its windows, and the external walls were shredded, but the main framework was intact. It would be easy to rebuild, given a little time and money.