Adiamante (32 page)

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Authors: Jr. L. E. Modesitt

BOOK: Adiamante
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“Continue resonation.”
The resonation was having another effect—shaking the attack scouts into dust and energy. I tried to block the feelings, but I still felt sorry for the doomed pilots.
“Line four at eighty percent,” rasped Elanstan through the command lines.
I shunted the last section of link nodes into line four.
“Ninety-four percent.” Her signal strengthened, but only slightly.
“Particle beams depowered,” Rhetoral reported. The rep screen verified the cutoff, and the chill white lines that appeared next confirmed the de-energizers.
“Reflect one,” I ordered, initiating the shimmer shift, taking the screen a turn underweb—not really a turn, but a fraction of a turn.
Another
clinking
shivered along the net as more souls shattered or snuffed out in mindblazed agony.
The rep screen showed another wave of heavy torps, and another line of attack scouts.
“Need net-flex,” whispered Elanstan.
“NET-FLEX … NOW!” I ordered, and threw the focus outward for as short a snap as I could, a snap of mindlinks, boosted with pure energy, trying to shield against the agony that would follow.
On the rep screen the shield shimmered, then expanded momentarily, shivering space ever so slightly, and an energy curtain fell across the twelve adiamante hulls. The hulls held, but the cyb de-energizers flickered and stuttered.
As those beams faltered, knives slashed through my
skull, knives from the thousands of deaths that single flex had cost.
Impossibly, the cybs re-energized those beams that tore at the defense shields, and once more white lines jabbed and sucked at the silver barrier, and link nodes, one after another, snuffed black.
“Lines three and four at eighty-five percent.”
“Holding.” We had no more link reserves.
“Target flex, Ecktor! Target flex.” Elanstan's recommendation sounded as though it had been flayed from her, but she was right.
“TARGET FLEX—MARK! NOW!”
Another massive energy boost, and the shield flexed, then narrowed into a purple shaft aimed at the cyb fleet, broad enough to cover them all.
A sunburst flared where Gamma station had been, followed by Kappa, then Beta, as each station surrendered all the power it had—and more—to throw that shaft.
As the shaft reached the first Vereal Union ship, space shivered, and so did I, as adiamante fragments sprayed space, releasing more energy.
I ignored, heart-pounding, the slumped body that had been Crucelle, as I tried to keep that energy focused into its destructive form.
A second cyb-ship went—and a third.
More figures slumped around the control center, more souls backblazed into oblivion as the shield energies coruscated across where the cyb fleet had been—and rebounded.
Elanstan and Rhetoral said nothing, screamed nothing, but their deaths were like two black arrows through me.
My skull was flayed open, my eyes were blind, streaming tears of acid burned my skin, and I sat there blind and deaf, dumb, for a time. My mouth was dry.
“L
et's see,” murmured the fleet commander.”Weapons, hold ten percent of busters. Hold ten, and release the rest.”
“Ninety away, Commander.”
Gibreal watched as the ninety torps with the tach-heads flashed forth. Sets of white-dashed lines flared on the screens, like ancient spiderwebs dropping down to bracket Old Earth.
“No!” protested the envoff—too late, as the cyb commander hammered her into mental jelly with his overrides.
Twelve purple-white globes flared into existence beyond Old Earth, and from each stabbed lines of purple-white fire. Where each line intersected an accelerating torp, a star-point of light, an instant mini-nova, flared.
“Helpless? Helpless demis? Hardly.”
A single white-purple band appeared around the image of Old Earth held in the ops and weapons screens and in the shipnet: a band like an antique halo, except that it circled the planet beyond the atmosphere and directly above the planetary equator.
“Analyze!” snapped Weapons.
“Systems unknown,” answered MYL-ERA. “Energy output equivalent to …” The exact number exceeded verbal translations and was projected directly to the net-workers.
“ … more than a dozen fleets …”
“Sanitize!” snapped Gibreal. The fleet commander scanned the screens before him in his personal command center, and those he could touch on the net, dismissed
both the backup visuals cursorily, and attempted to gauge the enormous power represented by the single white-purple band that arced around the globe that was Old Earth.
More torps flared into energy, but not all of the ninety launched initially.
“Dispersal one,” ordered the fleet commander.
“Dispersal one beginning,” confirmed Weapons, phasing the scout launches so that only a single ship had open locks at one time.
The energy
humming
from the white-purple band around Old Earth seemed to vibrate space itself, setting up a resonance in the
Gibson
that blurred Gibreal's visual images on the net, where clarity was never lacking.
“Network at one hundred ten percent of capacity,” announced MYL-ERA. “Dropping non-ops nodes.”
The net resonance decreased, but a fuzzy edge remained around the net visuals, and hissing permeated every word and concept hurled along the energy channels and even along the backup fibrelines.
“Power particle beams.”
At Gibreal's command, the full output of hundreds of fusactors within the adiamante hulls of the Vereal fleet transferred pure energy into a dozen lines of white hell that flared toward Old Earth.
With those energy lines appeared a second purple-white band, snapping into place at right angles to the first, so that Old Earth beneath the energy flows was divided into quarters.
Then came a third band, and a fourth, and the four bands created a shimmering haze-web behind which the planet seemed to vanish.
The concentrated energy from the twelve particle beams splashed across the shield, and with that impact, the adiamante hulls began to vibrate, to shiver as adiamante hulls had never shivered for the cybs.
“Overlap shields,” ordered Gibreal. The energy shields from the twelve adiamante hulls clicked into and around each other, and the
humming
that had threatened to shake the
Gibson
into adiamante fragments and metallic dust subsided into a background whine.
“Systems at one hundred five percent,” reported MYL-ERA.
“Drop habitation, all nonessentials.”
“Dropping all nonessentials this time,” responded MYL-ERA.
Beyond the overlapped shields, the armed scouts flared into energy and subatomic particles.
“Interrogative halt dispersal one,” asked Weapons.
“Negative. We need to keep their targets spread.”
“Old Earth energy expenditure on scout destruction less than one percent of fields in existence,” reported MYL-ERA.
“Negative,” reiterated Gibreal.
A second wave of scouts reached the barriers of the linked shields—and vanished into the growing cloud of shimmering dust and energy that flared up before the twelve adiamante hulls.
The particle beams still splashed away from the barrier that protected the planet before the Vereal ships.
In a voice as cold and hard as ice four, Gibreal ordered, “Power shift. All power to de-energizers.”
Unseen beams, represented by green dashes on the visual representational screens, focused on the nexial points of the purple-white bands that shielded Old Earth from the cyb energy weapons.
The shimmering haze that shielded Old Earth shivered, vibrated, but held.
“Almost,” grunted Gibreal. “Almost.”
“Fire remaining busters! Now!”
The ten tach-heads mounted on subtranslation drives flashed toward Old Earth, apparently untouched.
The third wave of scouts passed the Vereal shields—and remained intact.
Then, impossibly, the shimmer-shield of Old Earth flared, flexed, and both scouts and torps were gone.
A second sun followed that flexing, a sunburst so violent that the Vereal shipnets screamed.
As the electroneural screaming dropped, and the screens cleared, Gibreal noted that the Old Earth shield flickered ever so slightly, and one of the asteroid stations had lost its shields.
“Systems, get me more power for the de-energizers. Anywhere.”
“Power output is at ninety percent maximum and degrading.”
“Get me power,” Gibreal grunted.
“Half the crew's dead,” protested Weapons. “No power, no atmospheric integrity.”
“I ordered power.” As his thoughts iced over the net, Gibreal slammed the overrides and smashed through the weapons officer's barriers. Weapons slumped in his couch, mind-burned, mind-numb.
All but the priority screens went dead.
“Power at ninety-two percent for three minutes.”
The de-energizers stabbed and worried.
The silver shimmer-shield flickered and wavered, then flexed once more, throwing a lance of purple-white flame that seemed to climb back up the line of de-energizers.
The
Gibson
shivered once, then began to vibrate. With a shrieking hiss, the net stabbed at the cybs still conscious, and Gibreal cut his connection, his eyes burning, his fingers stabbing at the slow, hard-wired, fibreline-linked controls before him.
As the first flicker of purple stripped the fleet shields, as the first Vereal ship shuddered, shivered, and translated into energy and fist-sized globules of adiamante, a second
asteroid system station flared, and a third … and fourth … .
“Depower!” Gibreal's fingers slashed at the clumsy switchplates and dials, but the lance of white-purple flame continued to climb back toward the twelve adiamante hulls.
Gibreal hit another set of switchplates, and found them powerwelded open. Finally, he cold-slammed the fusactors, and sat in the dim red light of the emergencies, waiting before the blank black screens … waiting, as purple fire inexorably climbed the dead pathway of the de-energizers toward the twelve dead hulls.
“Systems … non-functional … non-functional …” pulsed MYL-ERA, her words electronic mutters on the dying net that had once bound the
Gibson
and the eleven other ships as tightly as their adiamante hulls.
In the silence of empty space, white-purple energy consumed twelve hulls, then rebounded.
With that last pulse, the impact of the energy recoil, the global energy net shivered and fragmented … . Vanishing as if it had never been … . carrying with it the remaining asteroid stations.
Beneath the spreading cloud of adiamante fragments, and ionized atoms that had been ships' interiors and crews, a last double-handful of torps dropped toward the planet below, past the vanishing violet energy of the defense system, dropped across oceans, mountains, homing on the strongest energy sources, except for one pretargeted hill in lower Deseret, where the energy radiations were almost nil.
F
inally, I managed to click out of step-up, but all I could do was stare at the representational screen of the control center.
No cyb ships—and not a single asteroid station.
My eyes and mind kept burning—burning for Crucelle, Elanstan, and Rhetoral and all those on the ell stations—and for poor unbending Arielle, who would try for the rest of her life to find rational explanations for the irrational behavior of the cybs, and for the need to apply the Power Paradigm.
“Forty-three torps under the beams … .” said someone.
I turned and looked at Wiane, her eyes wide with horror.
Beyond her sat the darkangel, blackness around her like a shroud, immobile.
Above us all loomed the wide representational screen, showing the approaching trails of the more than forty killer torps—the legacy of the cybs, and The Flight.
With a struggle, I accessed the locators.
“First impact at Chitta—seven standard minutes.”
“Interrogative impact at Parwon.”
“Nine standard minutes.”
After a time, I slowly turned in the swivel. Arielle remained frozen, sitting on the eternal tile beside Crucelle's body, not touching him, just there. Kemra still sat in the straight-backed chair, eyes wide, glued on the representational screen, as though she still could not believe that the fleet of the Vereal Union—twelve impregnable adiamante hulls—had ceased to exist. Except that they hadn't just ceased to exist—across Old Earth, more than a half million
demis had given their minds and lives to stop that fleet.
I looked down. My eyes burned too much to weep, but I felt that way—and insane widower that I was, I was angry.
First I pulled myself out of the swivel and eased over to Arielle. “I'm sorry,” I whispered, touching her shoulder. Crucelle had wanted me to be Coordinator, and I knew why. So did she, but it didn't make it any easier.
“You did what had to be done. He wanted that. And you tried everything to make it fall on you.” She shook her head. “I'll be fine. I always am.”
I didn't know quite what to say, but I squeezed her shoulder. “When you want to talk …”
“I know.”
Then I straightened and looked around the center, assessing the losses—Crucelle, Liseal, Sebestien, and Vieria—four out of ten.
“Now?” asked Wiane hoarsely.
“We wait until forty-three tach-heads turn forty-three locials into black glass, and then we clean up.”
“The cybs?” asked Keiko.
I'd forgotten about that detail. “Sorry. We gather together enough restraint squad members from the holding areas and outliers and we round up the fifteen hundred leftover cybs. Then we clean up.” I shrugged. “I'll lead the group here. But that will have to come later.” Later, after all the immediate cleanup and relocation.
With nothing else that I could do at that moment—and I didn't want just to sit and watch the screen while locial after locial was devastated—I walked across the center toward the cyb subcommander. Kemra shrank in her chair.
“Are you happy, mighty cyb? You certainly got your vengeance. More than ten thousand of us for every dead cyb and marcyb. More before this is over.”
She looked blank.
“That screen was powered not just with fusactors and
boosters and relays and nodes and links, but with the soul and mind of every adult demi on the planet.”
The ground shivered then, enough that I had to reach out and steady myself on the wall, despite the shock absorbers, despite the klicks of rock above and around the center.
With the second, fainter shiver I felt, I wondered. Two torps for Parwon?
I went back to the remote scanners, throwing the image on the screen.
In the screen was the rising plume of smoke that resembled, I had been told, an ancient NorAm sombrero—that was some kind of hat used by cattle tenders back when the cattle were more plentiful than the bison.
Then the knives of the backlash hit, and most of us swayed, or worse. Someone retched, and I saw Wiane collapse, more like a faint than a mental snuffing, though.
Beside her, Dorgan paled, and his face twisted, his mind already shredding under the agonies of the few unshielded draffs dying above, of the other demis dying, and of the land itself.
Kemra looked across us, her face blank and uncomprehending, and I wanted to throttle her, except my head hurt too much to move.
Parwon was black glass, and I hoped all the draffs had left, and that the cybs hadn't, but I suspected that Henslom had had more than enough sense to move his troops away. They would have to have moved quickly, though.
When my head cleared, I pinpointed the second tach-head. I no longer had a house, just a hilltop of black glass. Apparently, the residence of the planetary Coordinator was a military target, and I wondered how many times they'd tracked my flitter just to make sure.
Better my house than a locial. How many locials were gone? How many meleysen trees and how many more centuries would it take?
On the screen, black starbursts continued to dot the image of Old Earth, but the skies were clear, clear of cyb-ships, clear of satellite asteroid stations.
“What …” stuttered Kemra.
“No fleet. No cybs, except you and whoever Henslom and Ysslop managed to get away from Parwon and Ellay.” I nodded. “Yes, your commander nuked the locials holding his own troops.”
“But how?”
I didn't feel like answering, and I had a lot to do. “You people never looked, never asked how we had managed. You never paid any attention. You're like self-indulgent children.” My words snapped at her, and I should have been more patient, but with the world collapsed around us, I wasn't feeling patient. Besides, there were people hurt, dying, and dead, and I could explain later.
I dropped back into the command seat and accessed the Parwon receiving shelter through the hard-wires. With the surface destruction, all the nets, except for the emergency net, were down.
Seborne was in charge of the receiving area, working with Maris.
“This is Coordinator Ecktor. Is Seborne there?”
A dark-eyed visage on a wiry frame looked at me through the screen. “Coordinator, Seborne didn't make it.” The dark eyes were bloodshot, and her face twitched.
“Lictaer.” I recognized the restraint squad leader. “Are you running the receiving area?”
“No, ser. Just the console. Ferik was Seborne's assistant.”
“Can you run him down?”
“Just a moment.”
While I waited, I wondered just how many details had been left hanging. I wanted to take care of Henslom, but that would have to wait. Hopefully, not too long.

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