Bunny and Alessandra played strong on one theme, always letting through the same overriding question: Where’s the navy? Time after time they replayed the spectacular nova-bright explosion of the Second Chance as she died in battle above Anshun.
The feeds from the assaulted planets made Alessandra grateful she was safe on Augusta, hundreds of light-years behind the front line. She asked Ainge about that, an analyst from the StPetersburg institute for strategic studies whose hologram was sitting beside her.
‘I think it’s significant that they’re only assaulting our worlds closest to Dyson Alpha,’ Ainge said. ‘It implies a range limit on their wormhole generators.’
‘But Wessex is a hundred light-years inside the boundary of phase three space,’ Alessandra said.
‘Yes, but from a tactical point of view it was worth the expenditure risk trying to capture it. If they’d been successful, we would have lost a considerable portion of phase two space. That would almost have guaranteed our ultimate loss. As it is, we’re going to have trouble fighting back. We know the kind of resources they have available; it could well be we never regain the twenty-three outer planets.’
‘In your professional opinion, can we win this war?’
‘Not today. We need a radical rethink of our strategy. We also need time, which is a factor very much dictated by the Primes.’
‘The navy says its warships are on the way to assist the assaulted planets. How do you rate their chances?’
‘I’d need more information before I can give you a realistic assessment. It all depends on how well defended the Prime wormholes are. Admiral Kime has to succeed in sending a warship through to attack their staging post. That’s the only way to slow them down.’
Bunny was telling Alessandra that Mellanie had come on line.
‘I thought Randtown had dropped out of Elan’s cyber-sphere,’ Alessandra said.
‘It is, but she’s found some way through.’
‘Good girl. Has she got anything interesting?’
‘Oh yeah. I’m giving her live access. Stand by.’
Alessandra saw a new grid image appear in her virtual vision. It shifted into prime feed position.
Mellanie was in some kind of open-air bus station, a big square expanse of tarmac with a passenger waiting lounge along one side. Every window had been blown out along the front of the building, with the support pillars bent and half of the solar collector roof missing. Despite how bright it was outside, a heavy rain was falling from a cloud-veiled sky. The relentless deluge was making life even more miserable for the hundreds of people swarming through the station. A full-scale exodus was in progress. Queues were trailing back from a logjam of stationary buses, the able-bodied paired with the moderately injured, helping them along. Four buses had been converted into makeshift ambulances, their seats removed and slung out to pile up beside the wrecked waiting lounge. The badly injured on crude stretchers were being carried on board; a lot of them were in a bad way, with their wounds being treated in the most primitive fashion, wrapped in cloth bandages rather than healskin.
Engineers were clustered round open hatches on the sides of the buses, rewiring the superconductor batteries. Alessandra glimpsed Mark Vernon in one repair group, working away furiously. But Mellanie didn’t pause in her establishing scan. The roads around the station were packed with 4x4s and pick-up trucks that were stuffed full of kids and uninjured adults.
‘Mellanie,’ Alessandra said. ‘Glad to see you’re still with us. What’s the situation there in Randtown?’
‘Take a look at this,’ Mellanie said in a flat voice.
Her visual sweep continued until she was looking down across the broken town. The bus station was obviously at the back of Randtown, where the ground started rising into foothills. It was a position which gave her a view out over the shattered roofs to the Trine’ba beyond. She raised her head to the mass of thick black clouds roofing the giant lake. Finally, Alessandra understood why it was so bright.
Thirty miles away, the rucked thunderclouds were sprouting a pair of radiant tumours, huge writhing bulges that were billowing downwards. She watched the base of the largest burst apart as eight slender lines of solid sunlight sliced down through it to strike the surface of the lake. Steam detonated out from the impact, sending a circular cascade of blazing mist soaring across the heaving water. The light was so intense it threw the town and countryside into stark monochrome. Mellanie’s retinal inserts brought up their strongest filters, though they could barely cope. Most of the townspeople in the bus station were cowering away from it, bringing their forearms up to cover their eyes. Screams and shouts of panic were coming from all around. They were quickly smothered as a strident roaring sound reached the town, rattling the remaining buildings. It grew steadily louder until Mellanie’s whole skeleton was thrumming painfully. The image which her retinal inserts were feeding back to Alessandra’s studio was reduced to a blurred black and white profile. Directly over Randtown the clouds were in torment, savaged by conflicting high-velocity pressure fronts. The chittering rain changed in seconds, curving with the wind to streak along almost horizontally, each drop stinging sharply as it hit unprotected skin.
‘Plasma drives,’ Mellanie screamed above the never-ending thunderclap. ‘Those are ships coming down.’
The second tumour 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 blood-red haze as her hand came close to translucence. 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 upwards. 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-calibre 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, and 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 colours.
‘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 eighty miles 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 four miles 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 marshalling 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 armour 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 channelled 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 towards the coast. Two hundred Prime ships had already splashed down on Anshun, 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 forty miles 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 metres above the ground. Behind it, a swathe of soil a hundred metres 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 their super-structure, tall doorways had hinged outward to form horizontal platforms. Smaller craft were flying out of the openings, squat grey 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 weapon 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 towards Scraptoft at Mach twelve. Prime flyers arched round 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 miles 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 vapour spewed out, boiling high above the clouds until they were pulled apart by the jetstreams. Metres above the ground, aerobots and Prime flyers alike vectored round in high-gee manoeuvres in an attempt to avoid the miasma of incendiary particles. The eight Prime landing ships were poised fifteen kilometres 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 kilometres 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, smothering the dome to bring 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 vapours asphyxiating the land. A visual spectrum sensor locked on to one of the flyers that had landed in the smouldering ruins of a tourist complex. Sections of the cylindrical fuselage had opened, extending ramps. Aliens walked down, their bodies encased in suits of dark armour reinforced by force fields.
‘Taller than us,’ Nigel observed dispassionately.
‘Weird walk,’ Wilson replied. He was watching the crea-ture’s four legs, the way they bent, the curving feet shaped like a blunt claw. 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. br />
‘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 kerb where they’d been waiting.
Mark kept glancing round 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, and 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 centre 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 round 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 rearguard 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.