The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (118 page)

Wilson was alone in his awful white-glowing office, waiting for people to arrive for the second management meeting of the morning, the one on ship production scheduling and subcomponent delivery supervision. The override priority call that came in from the planetary defense division made him sit upright in his chair as it delivered big emergency icons to his virtual vision. The wormhole detector network was picking up unidentified quantum signatures inside Commonwealth space. Wormholes were opening in several star systems.

The office began to dim, scarlet and sapphire digits slipped along the ceiling and down the walls as emerald graphics flowered across the floor. The projections stabilized, arching out into the air to place Wilson at the center of a tactical star chart. He was close to the boundary of the Commonwealth, where phase three space dwindled away into galactic night. Twenty-three star systems were encircled by amber icons, with small script windows full of digits and icons.

“Twenty-three wormholes?” he murmured in dismay. The navy only had three functional warships, and eight scoutships refitted as missile carriers. Then the dataflow increased, clarifying the information coming in from the detector network. Forty-eight separate wormholes had opened in each of the twenty-three star systems, bringing the total to over eleven hundred. That was about the same number of gateways operated by CST itself. “Son of a bitch.” He couldn’t believe the numbers, he who’d been to Dyson Alpha and seen the scale of the Prime civilization for himself.

More information was pouring through now, complementing the navy network. The cyberspheres on Anshun, Belembe, Martaban, Balkash, and Samar were already suffering huge glitches and area crashes. Reports of explosions were coming in from the government systems of those planets, in almost every case corresponding to electronic failure zones. Twenty-three translucent globes expanded into Wilson’s image, representing the planets under attack. Detailed imagery was hard to find for any of them. Land survey satellites, geosynchronous relay platforms, industrial stations, and high inclination meteorological sensors were being systematically blasted out of orbit. Wormholes appeared as bright scarlet diamonds poised over the planets. They winked in and out of existence, changing position by the minute to avoid sensor lock. Radar tracked high-velocity projectiles flying out of them at each emergence.

The navy was losing contact with its detector stations on Elan, Whalton, Pomona, and Nattavaara, all planets in phase three space with relatively small populations. One by one the stations were dropping off the network, reducing the resolution in the display. No stations at all had survived on Molina, Olivenza, Kozani, and Balya, phase three worlds that weren’t even open to general settlement yet.

Anna materialized beside him, a ghostly gray outline. It was as if they were both on their acceleration couches back on the
Second Chance
again. “They started with nukes!” she said, aghast.

“We know how they fight battles,” he said, deliberately harsh, numbing himself to what all the display graphics really meant. With her there it was easier to haul back on his own emotions. He was the commander, he had to keep calm and analytical, to suppress that small part of himself that wanted to run out of the office and head for the hills. “Get Columbia into the command circuit. And find our ship positions for me.”

“All of them?” There was a lot of bitterness in the question.

“Do it!” His own hands were busy pulling planetary government civil defense data out of the unisphere. Little blue lights appeared on the twenty-three planet representations: cities with force fields. On the four start-up worlds, only the CST stations were protected.

Rafael Columbia came on-line, appearing on the other side of Wilson from Anna. “There are so many,” he said, and for once even he sounded intimidated and uncertain. “We’re launching combat aerobots now. They should provide some interceptor coverage against those projectiles, but only around major population centers. Damnit, we should have built ten times this many.”

“Get every working city force field up,” Wilson told him. “And not just on these twenty-three worlds. There’s no guarantee this is the limit of the invasion. Use the planetary cyberspheres to issue a mass warning, I want people to get under cover. That’s a start.”

“Then what?”

“When I’ve got more information, I’ll tell you. We need to know what they’re going to do after the initial bombardment. Anna, bring the rest of the strategy and command staff in, please. We’re going to need a lot of help today.”

“Yes, sir. I’m tracking the starships now.”

White indicators appeared inside the starfield, tagged with identification data. He had seven ships within range of the detector network. Two scoutships were days away outside the Commonwealth; while the warships and remaining scoutships were spread out around the indistinct boundary of phase three space. Wilson made a decision. “Contact the captains,” he told Anna. “I want them all to rendezvous half a light-year out from Anshun.” Their old base was the CST junction planet for the sector, and as such the most heavily populated. “We’ll start our counterattack there.” At least neither of them laughed outright at that.

“Oh, goddamnit,” Rafael grunted.

Inside the tactical display another swarm of amber warning icons were blinking up, much deeper in Commonwealth space around planet twenty-four: Wessex.

“Do what you can for them,” Wilson told Rafael. He wished it didn’t sound like a feeble joke.
Could we have known it was going to be this massive?
A terrible thought crept out:
The Guardians knew.

“Sir,” Anna exclaimed. “I’ve got Captain Tu Lee on a direct link. They were still at the Anshun base.”

“What?”

“She’s on the
Second Chance
.”

Wilson’s virtual hand blurred as it jabbed at the communications icon. “What’s your situation?” he demanded as Tu Lee’s anxious face appeared in his virtual vision.

“Disengaged from the dock.” Tu Lee winced. Her image suffered a ripple of static. “Taking some incoming fire. Force field holding. What are your orders?”

Wilson almost whooped out loud. Finally, some good news. “Eliminate as many of the planetary bombardment projectiles as you can. Don’t, repeat, do not try and take on a wormhole. Not yet. I need information on them.”

“Aye, sir.”

“Godspeed, Captain.”

The
Second Chance
’s big life-support wheel finished its emergency despin procedure, eliminating the problem of precession, which had been screwing up their maneuvering ability.

“Full acceleration,” Tu Lee ordered the pilot. She’d been captain for a week now, taking over when the ship docked after its last mission. The navy had sent it on a deep scouting mission three hundred light-years from the Commonwealth. It didn’t have the speed of any of the new scoutships, but it beat them hands down on endurance. It also had the kind of delta-V reserve that only the new warships could match.

Their plasma rockets responded smoothly to the pilot’s instructions, producing one and a half gees acceleration. They were a thousand kilometers above Anshun’s nightside equator, and curving around above the second largest ocean. The big portals at the front of the bridge were showing brilliant white flares of nukes detonating below them. Tu Lee barred her teeth in fury at the devastation. For her the light was carefully color-coded and intensity-graded; for anyone on the surface it was near-certain death.

“Laroch, have we got a pattern for the emergence sequence yet?” she asked.

“I can confirm there’s forty-eight wormholes,” said Laroch, who was operating the sensor console. “But they keep jumping around at random. The only constant is their altitude, about one and a half thousand klicks.”

“Okay, let’s keep under that level, and track the bombardment projectiles in range. Weapons, fire whenever we get a lock. Pilot, if there’s a cluster, get us in range.”

“Incoming,” Laroch called.

Eight alien missiles hurtled toward the
Second Chance
. The pilot vectored their plasma rockets, altering trajectory. Plasma lances fired out from the starship’s midsection, ripping across space before bursting apart on the missiles’ force fields. Lasers locked on, pumping gigawatts of energy, straining the force fields badly. The plasma lances fired again finally overloading the missiles’ shielding. Multiple detonations blossomed silently above the planet, their plasma clouds merging into a seething patch of pure light over fifty kilometers across.

“Batch of sixteen projectiles emerged,” Laroch called out. “Heading for the planet.”

The bridge portals had them tagged, green needles with vector digits flicking around at high speed. Tu Lee called up the ship’s own missile launch command, and fired a volley of interceptors. As they leaped away at fifty gees she loaded in a sequential pattern of diverted energy functions for their warheads. The interceptors split apart into a cascade of independently targeted vehicles, rocket exhausts expanding like a starburst of lightning bolts as they spread out in pursuit of the alien projectiles. Megaton warheads detonated, a chain of dazzling lightpoints distorting the planet’s ionosphere in huge undulations, their diverted energy function sending huge emp effects rippling out.

Several of the alien weapons immediately went dead, their exhausts fading away as they tumbled inertly toward the dark landscape hundreds of kilometers below. A second barrage of warheads detonated. This time the diverted energy was channeled into one-shot X-ray lasers, directing seventy percent of the explosion’s power into a single slender beam of ultrahard radiation. Every remaining projectile broke apart, glowing debris flying outward in sinister mimicry of a meteorite shower’s splendor.

Four more wormholes opened close to the
Second Chance
; thirty-two missiles flew out from each. Delicate fans of sensor radiation stroked against the starship. The gee force on the bridge swung around, pressing Tu Lee into the side of her chair. Straps tightened around her shoulders and waist, holding her in place.

“There might be a lot of them,” Laroch said. “But their software is useless. I’m picking up a lot of microwave emissions from the wormholes; the missiles are being continuously updated and guided.”

The
Second Chance
fired volley after volley of plasma lances at the new attackers as they closed at twenty gees. A massive series of nuclear explosions turned space outside the starship a glaring uniform white. Waves of thin plasma slithered across the outer force field, shaking the superstructure. Tu Lee could hear loud metallic groans as the hull twisted and flexed from the pummeling. It was as if they were flying through a star’s corona, blinded by the hot radiation glare and buffeted by relativistic particle currents. The starship streaked out of the energy storm, a shimmering scarlet bubble trailing long cataracts of hydrogen plasma. Twenty-four alien missiles chased around to intercept her.

Alarms were shrieking from every bridge console. Screens threw up systems schematics as the crew and the RI tried to reestablish functions.

“Jump us out,” Tu Lee ordered.

At the hyperdrive console, Lindsay Sanson activated the wormhole generator.
Second Chance
vanished from space above the planet.

“How bad is that software?” Tu Lee demanded.

“Strange,” Laroch said. “It’s very inflexible, nothing like as advanced as ours. It’s almost as if they don’t have smart programs.”

“We can use that,” Tu Lee said. She glanced at the main status display. The starship’s systems had suffered nothing too critical. Outside of some hull ablation and tank breaches, most of the damage had been absorbed by peripherals in the life-support wheel. Without the exploration and science teams they had only forty crew on board; no one was in any immediate danger. “Get everyone into suits,” she said as she called up a display of their missile reserves. “Then take us back.”

A lambent patch of turquoise light twisted out of nowhere eight hundred kilometers above Anshun’s capital Treloar.
Second Chance
leaped out of its center as the nimbus shrank away. The starship fired fifteen missiles, then her wormhole generator distorted space again and she vanished back into hyperspace. She reappeared almost instantaneously five thousand kilometers away, this time above Bromrine, a coastal city whose population of two hundred thousand was cowering under their protective force field dome. Another fifteen missiles were fired before she dived back into hyperspace.

She made another nine jumps around the planet, launching all one hundred seventy-three remaining missiles.

As soon as they were released, the missiles in each salvo fired their rockets briefly, spreading out from their launch point, then shut down. Their sensors scanned around, searching for a wormhole. When one emerged, their rockets ignited again, racing toward it at fifty gees. The alien projectiles barely had time to clear the wormhole rim before they were subjected to emp assault, electronic warfare, X-ray laser pulses, kinetic impacts, and nuclear blasts. Very few of them made it through to slam down against the planet.

Second Chance
popped out of hyperspace again and began a quick data transmission to the beleaguered world below, telling the navy how they had mined near-orbit space. Eight wormholes emerged, encircling the starship at five hundred kilometers. Lindsay Sanson activated their hyperdrive. “Shit!”

“What?” Tu Lee asked. The bridge portals were still showing Anshun below them, its once-passive cloud formations swirling in agitation in the aftermath of the explosions.

“Interference. Space is so distorted from their wormholes we can’t open ours. It’s deliberate, they modified the quantum fluctuations to block us.”

“Move us,” Tu Lee yelled at the pilot.

Second Chance
’s plasma drive came on. She began to accelerate at over three gees.

Another eight Prime wormholes emerged around the starship.

“Fuck you,” Tu Lee told the Primes.

Ninety-six missiles flew out of each wormhole.