Liz raised her head. ‘Fuck! Yeah, baby. Come on, move it.’ Chunks of hot stone and smoking earth were pattering down all around them. A wide circle of boltgrass was on fire behind, pushing out a thick, foul-smelling smoke.
He half-crawled half-scrambled around the next set of boulders, and lay there panting heavily as his legs trembled. When he risked a glance backwards he saw a flyer hovering motionlessly at the entrance of the valley. He knew he should be taking another shot at it, but just couldn’t bring himself to line the weapon up. As he was watching, the flyer fired at a second craft that was curving around the first mountain. It exploded with incredible violence, lighting up the whole of the Turquino Valley as its wreckage whirled out of the air.
‘What . . .’
‘Mellanie,’ Liz declared. ‘She’s taken control of it.’
‘Goddamn it.’ The flyer rushed away. Seconds later the sound of explosions rattled down the narrow valley.
Mark checked the queue for the wormhole. Everyone had thrown themselves flat. ‘Come on,’ he growled at them. ‘Get up, you miserable assholes. Get up! Get moving.’
They couldn’t have heard him, but the ones closest to the wormhole staggered to their feet and rushed towards it. Their desperation triggered a panic surge, with everyone hurrying forwards at once. A scrum began to swell around the placid grey circle.
‘Oh brilliant,’ Mark snarled. ‘That’s all we need.’
‘They did well holding it together this long,’ Liz said.
After several minutes the pushing and shoving eased up, though any pretence at a queue was abandoned. Everyone was crowding round the wormhole; with the twilight fading and the bottom of the valley almost black, they resembled bees swarming round their hive.
‘Movement at the front,’ Simon’s voice crackled out of the hand-held array.
Armour-suited aliens were scurrying among the abandoned buses and cars. They were difficult to see among the shadows. There was no sign of the flyers. Mark checked the bustle round the wormhole. At least four hundred people remained.
‘Mark?’ Simon asked. ‘Are you ready?’
‘I guess so.’ Mark brought up his hunting rifle, and switched on the sight. The zigzag jam of buses appeared as neon-blue profiles against an oyster-grey ground. It was easy to see the aliens now. There were more of them than he realized, a lot more. They slid fluidly along the sides of the human vehicles, where the shadows were deepest. Weapons were swung up into open doors, or pushed through windows in the trucks as they searched for any sign of life. If they reached the head of the stream, everyone huddled round the wormhole would be a clear target. It would be a massacre.
Mark brought the rifle sight back on the lead bus, and tracked down the bodywork until he found the open hatch. It had taken him over an hour to prepare all the superconductor batteries, the manufacturers employed so many safety systems they were difficult to disengage. But eventually he’d wired them together in a single giant power circuit. The rifle sight bracketed the side of the battery. Mark fired.
The superconductor battery ruptured, discharging its energy in one massive burst. It triggered a chain reaction around the circuit. Every battery detonated in a blaze of electrons and white-hot fragments. Aliens went tumbling through the air, or were pummelled into the ground, shrapnel and snapping electric flares overloading their suit force fields. Several of their own weapons were ruined, exploding in turn, adding to the carnage.
Mark and Liz were running as soon as the blast began, heading further downslope, closer to the precious wormhole. There were only about two hundred people left now, all of them hunched down in reflex at the latest outbreak of violence.
‘That ought to slow them up,’ Mark yelled. ‘We’ll get out now.’ They ran past the last tumble of rocks which they’d picked out as cover. Boots splashed through the stream and they arrived at the back of the frantic pack of people pressing towards the wormhole. When he looked back all he could see was a red glow from the burning boltgrass around the entrance to the valley. ‘Simon? Simon, what’s happening?’
‘Good job, Mark,’ Simon’s voice came in, as calm as always. ‘They’re staying back. It will take them several minutes to regroup. You’ll all get through.’
Mark hung on to Liz’s hand as he pushed himself up on his toes to look over the heads in front of him. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred or so. Maybe two minutes, if one went through every second. No, surely they could squeeze through two abreast. A minute, then. Minute and a half, tops.
Daylight poured down into the Turquino Valley. Mark tipped his head back to gape up into the heavens. Far far above them, five small blue-white stars shone down with a painful strength as they grew and grew. He stared at the new phenomena as surprise gave way to a rush of fury. ‘Oh come on!’ he screamed at the terrible lights. His legs gave way, dropping him to his knees. Even so he raised his fists up to the new peril. ‘You can’t do this to us, you bastards. One minute left. One goddamn minute and I’d be out of here.’ Tears began to run down his cheeks. ‘Bastards. You bastards.’
‘Mark,’ Liz was on the damp soil beside him, arms going round his quaking shoulders. ‘Mark, come on baby, we’re almost there.’
‘No we’re not, they’ll never let us go, never.’
‘That’s not them,’ Mellanie said.
‘Huh,’ Mark looked up. The girl was standing above him, looking at the five dazzling lights. ‘That’s us,’ she said. ‘We did that.’
‘Up,’ Liz said, her voice hardening. ‘I mean it, Mark.’ She gripped one shoulder and pulled. Mellanie took his other side. Between them they dragged him to his feet. The last Randtown residents were scurrying through the wormhole. Above him the new stars were diminishing. Darkness was rushing back into the valley. Mark stumbled towards the wormhole, still not quite believing, expecting the fierce blast of a laser to catch him between his shoulders.
‘We’re ready for you, Simon,’ Mellanie said.
‘I cannot leave. This is my home. I will do what I can to thwart the monsters.’
‘Simon!’
‘Go. Be safe. Come back if you can.’
Mark reached the wormhole. His last sight of Elan was the abandoned MG metrosport, and Mellanie glaring angrily down the harsh little valley. Then he was through. Safe.
*
MorningLightMountain’s multitude of machine-derived senses observed the quantum distortion of the last human starship returning to battle above Anshun. It readied its ships to fire missiles and beam weapons. The humans were approaching fast. They were coming close. Dangerously close—
There was no warning. No time. Raw energy punched straight through the wormhole, flowering on the other side where the generator was sited on the asteroid. The hole in spacetime closed immediately as its generator was destroyed, but not before the awesome torrent of energy released by the dying ship had poured through. Thousands of ships above the asteroid flared briefly as their hulls vaporized inside the giant geyser of radiation. Wormhole generators imploded with spasms of gravitonic twists. The entire asteroid quaked as two hundred and eighty-seven collapsing wormholes wrenched at it, then shattered. Energy contained within the generators and wormholes was released in a single backlash, enhancing the already lethal deluge shining on the interstellar wormhole.
MorningLightMountain watched in horror as the massive wormhole linking the staging post back to its original system wavered and fluctuated. It diverted hundreds, then thousands of immotile group clusters to producing the correct command sequences which would calm and contain the instability. Slowly, the wild shivers of energy were tamed and refocused. The output from the surviving segments of the generator mechanism were remodelled to compensate.
It surveyed the wreckage of the staging post. One asteroid and its whole equipment complement were lost completely. Thousands of ships were ruined or disabled. Clusters of cargo units spun off into the void, moulting chunks of equipment that effervesced from every surface. Over three thousand immo
tile group clusters of varying sizes were irradiated and dying. Nearly a hundred thousand motiles were dead or dying.
Everything could be replaced, and rebuilt. Though such an effort would be expensive. Losing a quarter of its wormholes into the Commonwealth would definitely slow its original plan for expansion across the human worlds. Back in the home system, many immotile group clusters began to consider defences against another suicide attack.
Meanwhile, MorningLightMountain began to realign the surviving wormholes so that it still had routes to each of the twenty-three new worlds it had taken into its domain. After a while, ships flew again, carrying what remained of its supplies down to the planets. With the humans fleeing down worm-holes inside their guarded cities, motiles continued their advance across the new lands outside with little resistance.
25
As more and more time went by, so Ozzie’s confusion grew. He simply did not understand the planet they were on. For a start, the climate didn’t change, it was always the same muggy warmth with a slow breeze continually blowing in the same direction. With a tide-locked planet there should have been strong winds redistributing the heat received by the sunside to the cold of the darkside; big circulation currents that would blow perpetually around the globe, not this gentle zephyr. Of course, the island could be situated in the middle of a doldrum zone, which meant the winds were actually out there, somewhere over the perturbingly distant horizon, roaring across the sea in the kind of macro-storms that would make the most hardy sailor quail.
Ozzie had set up small meteorological models in the hand-held array, which broadly confirmed that theory. However, the modelling didn’t take into account the fact that the planet was orbiting inside a gas halo. Quite how that would affect the atmosphere close to the surface was a complete unknown. The array certainly didn’t have the kind of algorithms necessary to solve that interaction problem.
Then there was the remote grey cloudbank that was just visible squatting above the horizon. Every time they went back up the central hill to collect more wood, he checked its position. It never moved. And that was the direction the breeze was coming from.
He also made an effort to work out the distance to the nearby islands. Using the array’s inertial guidance function he measured the sight angle from both sides of the island he was on. This rough trigonometry put the closest forty-five miles away, which made the planet improbably massive.
The gas halo itself was an even bigger enigma. He couldn’t figure out the bright specks floating round inside it. A spectrographic analysis by his sensors showed they were made from water.
‘Does it really matter?’ Orion asked as Ozzie launched into another round of muttering about the latest batch of results from his sensors. ‘We know we have to get to another island to find a path out of here. So who cares what’s in the sky?’
‘Yes it does matter,’ Ozzie ground out. ‘I don’t understand how spheres of water like that form. It can’t be through droplet collision, they’re too big. Some of them are hundreds of miles across.’
‘So? You said the gas halo is breathable. Why shouldn’t it have water in it?’
‘That’s not the point, man. You should be asking, why is it there?’
‘So why is it there?’
‘I don’t fucking know!’
‘It was placed there,’ Tochee said. ‘Given this whole gas halo is artificial, the builders have incorporated the water spheres for a purpose.’
‘Thank you, Tochee,’ Ozzie said. He turned to Orion. ‘And I’d like to find out what that purpose is. To do that I need some basic information.’
‘Like what?’ the boy asked.
‘The water vapour content of the gas halo. The pressure of the gas halo. How much evaporation is going on from the water spheres. Their temperature. That kind of thing. But with this equipment, it’s a non-starter.’ Ozzie waved an annoyed hand at his little collection of sensors.
‘But why is it important?’ Orion persisted.
‘Because there are a lot of forces at work here that we can’t see. If I understood more about the gas halo, I might be able to get a decent handle on this weird planet.’
‘It’s just big, you said so. Bigger than Silvergalde.’
Ozzie gave up. ‘Yeah, man, that’s what it looks like, for sure.’ He gave the sky with its multitude of glinting specks a challenging stare. ‘Ah, to hell with it, we’ve got more pressing problems, right?’
‘The preparations are nearly complete,’ Tochee said. ‘We need one more harvesting trip for the fruit.’
‘Sure.’ Ozzie gave their completed craft a distrustful look. When they’d set about building a boat, he’d envisaged some kind of skiff, with a smooth hull of tight-fitting planks, a curving sail, himself standing by the tiller steering them to the next island. After all, with his harmonic-blade working again, carpentry should be easy; but the encyclopaedia files in the array had been brief on actual shipbuilding techniques. They’d wound up with the kind of raft that looked about as buoyant as a brick.
The first day had been spent cutting down one of each of the five tree varieties that grew on the hill, which Tochee then dragged down to the beach. One by one they were pushed out to sea. Most of the palm trunks sank lower and lower in the water as they became saturated. Only one kind floated properly, the gangly trees with their long bushy grey fronds; naturally the least populous on the island.
They had devoted the next five days to felling just about the entire population growing on the hill. Ozzie and Orion took turns wielding the harmonic-blade, chopping the branches from the fallen trunks, to leave relatively smooth boles which Tochee pulled down the hill.
After that stage came the rope weaving, a subject which was covered in slightly more detail by the encyclopaedia files. The dried palm fronds they used were tough and sharp, Ozzie and Orion had bleeding fingers within minutes of starting. They had to bring out the sewing kit and modify their old gloves to cope with the fronds. Even Tochee’s manipulator flesh wasn’t immune to the razor-like edges. Eventually, though, they had enough rope to lash the logs together. Three thick bundles, five metres long, provided the buoyancy, with a decking of more trunks at right angles holding them together. Their sail was made from the ubiquitous palm fronds woven into a square, which looked more like a piece of wicker floor matting than any recognizable fabric.
Orion thought the raft was fantastic, a genuine adventure waiting to happen. Tochee expressed its usual quiet approval for their endeavours. That just left Ozzie feeling like the one who had to tell them Father Christmas wasn’t real. He kept thinking it was something a bunch of eight-year-olds would build over a long boring summer.
Ozzie picked up his backpack, and the three of them headed back inland to look for more fruit. There were several types they’d discovered on the island, all of them found on bushes and mini-palms that grew close to the shoreline. He was soon snipping them off their stalks with his pocket knife and filling the backpack.
Orion and Tochee were rustling through the thick vegetation on either side of him. They were both excited at the prospect of leaving the island. Ozzie wished he could share their mood. Every time he gazed up at the gas halo he knew something here didn’t make sense. Why build such a phenomenal artefact, and then stick something as mundane as a planet in the middle of it? The gas halo was surely intended for life that could fly, God’s own aviary. The water spheres and Johansson’s airborne coral reefs were way stations for creatures that had no need of gravity, that lived as physically free as it was possible to do. He supposed that if the true core of the Silfen civilization had a physical location, it couldn’t have created a more appropriate home for itself.
‘An entire universe that is so small, yet so large within that it can never be known,’ Johansson had said of it. ‘A haven of mystery cloaked in the pinnacle of scientific development. How I marvelled at such a paradox.’
Ozzie struggled to remember what else the man had said. Something practical, at least. But Johansson h
adn’t been one to deal in specifics. Though there had been the intimation that he’d returned directly to the Commonwealth from here.
It took Ozzie about forty minutes to fill his backpack. ‘This ought to be enough,’ he said.
‘Groovy,’ Orion said with a grin, biting into one of the dark purple fruits that was flavoured like a mild raspberry. The thick juice dribbled over his lips, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand.
Ozzie took a moment to look at the boy. Orion was just wearing a pair of ragged shorts, sawn off from an old pair of trousers. He was nothing like as skinny as when they started off down the paths too many months ago; the walking and physical work had put a lot of muscle on him. His pale skin was heavily freckled, partially sunburned, slightly tanned, and of late almost permanently dirty. Wispy hair from his first beard was curling round his chin; while his ginger hair was fizzing outwards in knotted strings that were beginning to rival Ozzie’s own Afro for unruliness. In short he was becoming a proper little savage; all he needed was a spear and a loincloth and three millennia of human civilization would have passed him by completely.
My fault, Ozzie thought guiltily, I should have been firmer with him at the start, sent him back to Lyddington. Or failing that, insisted on some kind of schooling.
‘What?’ Orion asked, looking round to see what Ozzie was staring at.
‘When did you wash last?’
‘I had a swim this morning.’
‘With soap and water.’
‘There’s none left, you said it weighed too much to carry from the Ice Citadel.’
‘Oh, yeah, right. What about toothgel? Have you been using any?’
‘There’s only one tube left, and it’s yours. My teeth are fine. What is this?’
‘We need to do something about your hair. There’s things living in it, man.’
‘Speak for yourself.’
Ozzie pulled at his beard, suddenly very conscious of the example he’d been setting. ‘All right, tomorrow we both start getting back into the personal hygiene groove. Deal?’