‘Can you really do this?’ Andricea asked. ‘Destroy a whole world?’
‘Believe it,’ Laura said. She activated her biononic force-field function. A thin layer of air shimmered around her, rippling like a heat haze before stabilizing. Her u-shadow delivered a new coordinate for the wormhole terminus.
It opened a hundred kilometres above Ursell. Laura looked down across an expanse of filthy clouds. Even the stratosphere above was clotted with particles, staining it a benign sulphurous yellow. The quick mapping run they’d performed weeks earlier had given them a rough outline of continents and seas, so the terminus should be above land – a region devoid of radio emissions and without any large ruins.
She told the gateway to lower the terminus. It slipped down through the clouds, kilometre after kilometre of dank grey vapour. Exovision displays showed her the radiation level rising as the terminus approached the ground. Then it was abruptly dropping through the base of the cloud. The ground was five hundred metres away – a wasteland of flinty stone cluttered with boulders. There was no vegetation, only ribbons of dark lichen clinging to fissures in the rock. Turgid rain drizzled down, giving every surface a dull oil-rainbow gleam.
Under Laura’s direction, the terminus rotated to the vertical then turned three hundred and sixty degrees, allowing her to study the entire area. ‘Looks clear,’ she said.
‘How long will you need?’ Slvasta asked.
‘Not long. A few minutes, maybe,’ Laura said. She looked at the team standing behind the final trolley. ‘Stand by.’
‘Do you have to go through?’
‘Yes,’ she said firmly, and walked through the gateway onto Ursell. The light level was almost as bleak as it had been back in the crypt. Drizzle spluttered against her force field, dripping onto the sodden ground. Exovision displays showed her the atmospheric composition, the toxins and contaminants – all easily filtered by the force field. She turned full circle. There were hills in the distance, with tiny scarlet lights scattered along a deep valley. Her field scan function couldn’t detect any electromagnetic signals, though there was a spray of radiation coming from the valley, and also some strong magnetic fields. Having the Prime this close was still a worry, though. ‘Come on,’ she muttered. ‘Get it through.’
On the other side of the gateway, men pushed hard against the trolley. The floater began to trundle along the crypt’s stone floor.
Something moved. Laura’s secondary routines caught it – a flicker above the valley with the red lights. She turned and faced it, her enriched retinas scanning frantically. Infra-red was difficult; the cool rain wrecked the image. Light-amplification routines cut in.
Flying machines. Small, blunt hemispheres, maybe twenty metres across, eight deep. Stubby fin-wings. Strong magnetic field. Ducted fans tilted to power them forwards – heading straight for her.
‘Bollocks,’ she grunted. She twisted round. The floater was almost at the gateway. ‘Move it!’ she yelled. Nobody seemed to hear her. Her u-shadow transmitted a crude analogue radio signal. ‘Hurry! They’re coming. Push!’
The signal must have got through, roaring out of the tannoys. The scrum pushing the trolley strained hard. Slvasta and a half-dozen officers added their strength once again. The front of the floater emerged through the gateway.
A maser beam struck Laura. Her force field stiffened for an instant, flaring green. Amber warnings zipped across her exovision. Rain flash-vaporized around her, cloaking her in a seething steam squall.
‘Double bollocks.’ The beam was strong, but her force field could withstand it relatively easily. From this distance. Another beam struck her. The flyers were still seven kilometres away. She faced them, frowning with determination, bringing her arms up like some pre-Commonwealth priest-queen. Her biononic field function sent out a disrupter pulse. Ionization made the wet air flare purple-white as if a lightning bolt had just discharged. She fired again. Again.
Alien flyers tumbled out of the sky. The remaining flyers broke formation fast, shooting up away from the valley, accelerating into the dank camouflage of the rain and cloud base.
Behind her, the trolley carrying the floater cleared the rim of the gateway. It tilted down slightly and its small wheels dug into the wet ground. The team pushing it strained with all their might, but Laura could see it wasn’t going to budge.
‘Oh triple bollocks.’
Her u-shadow linked her to the CST BC5800d2’s smartcore, and the terminus shot upwards thirty metres. The floater fell out, smashing onto the ground five metres away from her and crushing the trolley. She looked up to see Slvasta and Javier standing at the edge of the terminus, staring down anxiously. She gave them a quick wave, hoping to reassure them. Another maser blast hit her. Her field function scan backtracked it easily. The flyer was hovering in the cloud two kilometres above. She hit it with a disrupter pulse.
Her u-shadow established a link to the floater’s smartnet. Its force field strengthened.
Pity there’s no way of using it to kill the individual flyers, she thought. When she glanced back at the valley, she could see another flock of flyers shooting up into the clouds. These ones looked even bigger.
Laura activated the floater’s wormhole, feeding in a coordinate that should see its terminus opening above Valatare. Somewhere from above, the flyers opened up a salvo of electronic-warfare pulses. They were crude, but still managed to degrade her link with the floater. Smoking debris from the flyer she’d destroyed began to hail down around her. Her scan pinpointed the sources of the electronic-warfare pulses, and she responded with more disrupter fire.
Then the floater’s wormhole opened: a sapphire haze streaked with white strands. Exovision displays showed her the terminus at the far end reaching for Valatare.
Eight flyers dropped from the base of the clouds. They were over a kilometre away and coming down fast. Another cohort dropped down on her other side. They were all emitting strong electronic-warfare distortion pulses, trying to fuzz whatever sensors she had. It was good, but not good enough to deflect Commonwealth systems. She blew the first group apart, its glaring fireball swelling out. The surging red light showed her things scampering over the drab wilderness.
Four stumpy legs, a fat pear-shaped body wearing some kind of black-glitter armour, with sensor stalks sprouting from the crown like whip antennae weighed down with electronic modules on their tips. No mistaking them: Prime motiles. The memory was ingrained into the human psyche after a war that had brought the Commonwealth to the brink of extinction.
No wonder the Void shat them out.
Laura blew up another flyer. Prime motiles were scuttling out of all the other hemispheres that had landed. The jerky way they moved, zigzagging from boulder to boulder, was like watching a charge of giant crustaceans. There was only silence around her, except for swift coded radio bursts. She emitted a powerful jamming signal, and watched with satisfaction as they all stopped moving for several seconds. The Prime weren’t a hive mind, but the motiles certainly qualified as a herd, functioning best while under direct control from the immotiles – who were the herd brains as well as the egg layers.
The smartnet on the floater above her reported it had established a realtime link to the Valatare floater through the wormhole. Her u-shadow was in direct control of both of them.
Now for the tricky part. Laura directed the Ursell floater’s terminus towards the Valatare floater, at the same time reconfiguring the Valatare floater’s mechanism. She wanted to turn it into a stable anchor for the Ursell floater’s wormhole rather than generate its own.
The motiles started to move again. Her field function scan detected small objects flying towards her on ballistic trajectories. The scan identified a small quantity of uranium inside each of them. ‘Holy fuck!’ Her secondary routines took over, running in parallel, identifying the mini-nukes arching through the air, and slammed out over a dozen disrupter pulses in less than two seconds.
Over twenty maser beams stabbed down, hitting the f
loater. Its force field resisted easily. She couldn’t waste time targeting the flyers overhead, but this all-out saturation attack was going to overwhelm her pretty quickly.
Her exovision was showing her the wormhole terminus easing slowly to the Valatare floater. The engagement procedure was working, helping to reel it in. Just a couple more minutes, and the gateway to the crypt and safety was a simple jump away . . .
But she had to be here, had to maintain a direct link with the floaters so her u-shadow could manage the incredibly complicated procedure. More mini-nukes came streaking towards her. Her routines knocked each of them out.
A dazzling flash erupted five kilometres away. Her force field turned opaque to cope with the monstrous gamma pulse. Data flowed across her exovision: the yield was about four kilotons. Survivable.
She watched the mushroom cloud ascending, finding its grotesque seething shape oddly elegant, as if seeing a legend reborn. The ground around her was suddenly steaming. Then the blast wave reached her, a rolling eruption of sand and small stones hurtling across the wasteland. She flung herself down. Her force field strained into a dull rouge as it fought the pressure slam. The screaming storm began to tip the floater up. She ordered it to expand its force field, and watched it take off, dwindling away into the sky, flipping round and round in the violent air. Her link remained intact.
Laura rolled over, seeing the BC5800d2’s terminus still hovering thirty metres above the ground, with long fronds of dust and vapour flashing across it. She couldn’t risk its force field being overloaded by Prime weapons. The radiation and pressure surge would kill everyone in the crypt – and probably smash half the palace to pieces, too.
With a sense of bitter inevitability she knew what she’d have to do next.
Slvasta was there, pressed up against the force field, watching aghast. Her u-shadow transmitted an analogue signal again.
‘For crud’s sake, Slvasta, pardon Bethaneve!’ she sent. ‘This is a big bad universe – you’ve seen that for yourself now, so you can’t go through it jumping at shadows. You have got to dial down your paranoia. Grow up, think logically, plan ahead. You have to defeat the Fallers, kill the bastard Trees. Build the atom bombs and get them up there into the Ring – any way you can. With the Trees gone there’ll be no limits to what your world can achieve. Do it!’
She saw him shouting at her, saw the anger and fright on his face. Her u-shadow linked to the BC5800d2, shutting down the wormhole and codelocking its smartcore. The terminus shrank to nothing then winked out in a purple ember of Cherenkov radiation. Her field function scan caught five more mini-nukes in flight. Secondary targeting routines zapped them.
At last, the Valatare floater’s smartnet reported it had anchored the wormhole from Ursell. The connection between the two planets was open and stable.
All right. Now we’re getting somewhere!
Over two hundred Prime motiles were advancing on her from all directions. More fliers were ascending from the valley. Twenty-five accelerated after the floater as it spun lazily through the air, gradually rising – four hundred metres high already.
Another mini-nuke detonated on the ground three kilometres away. Then a third went off.
Laura sent another batch of instructions into the linked floaters. The final procedure had to be enacted. Then the first of the new blast waves struck her, sending her rolling helplessly across the sharp rocks until she crashed into a boulder.
Pinned there by the wailing superheated wind, with her force field fizzing aquamarine, she stared upwards. The blasts had torn the clouds from most of the sky, allowing her to see the floater and its shimmering force-field bubble. The explosions were swatting it about brutally, sending it skipping higher and higher. Her u-shadow initiated the final sequence, and the wormhole’s diameter began to expand. She watched a plume of the gas giant’s hydrogen atmosphere come squirting out – thin at first, then gradually getting wider, but still the colossal pressure was maintained. Her mouth split open in a smile. It was acting like a rocket exhaust, accelerating the floater upwards. And the wormhole diameter continued to expand – a hundred metres wide now. Then bigger. The flow of gas was fierce and undiminished, backed by the incredible pressure of the gas giant’s atmosphere. And the fringes of the massive gas plume were bursting into stark blue flame as the hydrogen finally mixed with Ursell’s oxygen, creating a fire halo.
Another mini-nuke detonated, the closest yet. Laura left the ground, spinning over and over in the glowing air before crashing down painfully. Her exovision medical readouts blinked up a series of amber warnings. Biononics shut down nerve paths, closing off the pain.
The immotiles must be using the motiles as carriers, she thought, sending them crawling along ridges and depressions to infiltrate her defensive perimeter, sacrificing them. Which was what the Primes did: individual motiles were valueless.
The wormhole was two hundred metres wide now, its roar rivalling the awesome soundwall of the nukes. Laura ran a systems diagnostic on the two floaters. Everything was functioning very smoothly, all components within tolerance, gas feeding easily into the mass–energy converter.
Four hundred metres wide, and the sky above her was a single layer of elegant indigo flame.
‘It will never stop,’ she broadcast to the Primes in their own neurological code – and started to laugh. It wasn’t quite true, of course. Valatare’s atmosphere wasn’t infinite, but there was more than enough to crush and burn the Primes a thousand times over.
Her link to the Ursell floater was still working, which surprised her. She suspected the local immotile clusters were analysing what was happening, trying to decide what action to take. Demoting her priority status.
She started downloading her personal memory store into the floater’s smartnet for safekeeping.
Which has to be the universe’s most desperate roll of the dice.
The floater was seven kilometres in altitude, and its wormhole six hundred and eighty metres in diameter – and still widening. After analysing the component loading factors, she’d settled on halting the expansion at five kilometres in diameter. The floaters should be able to maintain that indefinitely.
The Primes launched a barrage of mini-nukes up at the catastrophic incursion.
‘Pissing in the wind, boys,’ Laura called out with manic cheerfulness as she deactivated her force field.
Ten mini-nukes exploded simultaneously above her—
BOOK TWO
Defence of the State
1
Captain Chaing, of the People’s Security Regiment (PSR), saw her in the crowd not twenty metres in front of him, and froze in shock. It was a joyful noisy crowd spread out along Broadstreet – thousands of people determined to enjoy the night’s festivities. Today was Fireyear Day: a public holiday for the whole world to celebrate the time when, two hundred and fifty-seven years ago, Ursell’s entire atmosphere burned and dear Mother Laura sacrificed herself to save Bienvenido. That was an event worth celebrating, and Opole’s residents were certainly going for it.
Chaing was new to the city; the PSR had only reassigned him from Portlynn two months ago. He thought it a drab provincial town, and spent those grim months wondering if he’d somehow pissed off his superiors and they’d sent him here as punishment. But today all that had changed. First there was the procession of big colourful floats through the city centre, then as dusk came bands claimed the street junctions, playing loud and fast music, and unlicensed stalls miraculously appeared to serve the excited people some truly throat-killing liquors. Half the city had turned out in bizarre and wondrous costumes, singing and dancing along the streets. The grand civic firework display was about to start.
It was a perfect time for any clandestine activity, which was why he’d arranged to meet the undercover agent in the Nenad Cafe on LowerGate Lane. His route took him along Broadstreet, and there she was, his own personal ghost – but in the flesh. He stood there numbly as the merry singing people swirled around him, watching her.
She was side-on to him, face heavily shadowed under her wide-brimmed hat, with her red hair braided into a neat tail that fell down her back. But he knew that profile; he could recognize her anywhere. Just to confirm it, she wore her brown leather coat, the one that came down to her ankles. And now she was walking away from him. That jolted him into action. He hurried after her.
Will I finally see her smile?
Chaing had seen her just once before, three decades ago, but that vision had haunted him ever since. He couldn’t stop it. Right from the start he’d been cursed with an excellent memory. And out of all the moments which made up his life, her face was the most vivid recollection. The rest of the incident he always pushed aside – too unpleasant. But her . . .
He’d been five years old, playing in the filthy alley behind their tenement block, when he tripped to sprawl across a mound of earth that turned out to be a bussalore nest. He’d screamed in terror as the vile rodents emerged from the dislodged dirt, squeaking and spitting.
Tiny stars of many colours sparkled behind his eyes, merging to form the picture of a beautiful lady with red hair. And abruptly a voice told him: Stand up, darling. Bussalores are intimidated by anything larger than themselves.
Chaing scrambled to his feet, and stared down at the nasty lean things slithering round his ankles. They regarded him for a moment, their noses twitching, sharp little teeth bared, before slinking away through a hole in the wall.
He was still standing in the same spot, trembling in shock, a minute later when his mother came hurrying out of the tenement.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked. ‘You did the right thing standing up. Bussalores are horrible things, but they’re basically cowards.’
‘Was that you?’ he asked incredulously. ‘Did you tell me what to do?’
His mother smiled nervously. ‘It’s your clever memory again, darling. I’ve told you several times what to do if you see a nest of bussalores.’