The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (121 page)

“God, Liz.” He snatched a hurried, guilty glance at the kids. “What for?”

“People can behave badly in times of stress. And I’m not convinced the way Carys is about the Primes leaving us alone.” She opened her jacket to show an ion pistol in a shoulder holster.

“Holy shit. Where did that come from?”

“A friend. Mark, we live kilometers from anywhere, and you were away from home during the day.”

“But … a gun!”

“I’m just being practical, baby, a girl should know how to look after herself.”

“Right,” he said dumbly. Today it didn’t seem important, somehow. In fact, he was rather glad she’d got it. He climbed up into the front of the pickup, and drove it off down the long track to the main valley road.

Randtown was still standing. Sort of. The Regents had deflected the worst of the blast upward, but the terrible distorted pressure waves that had rushed out from the mountains had easily reached the town.

Composite and metal paneling had been twisted and torn off every building. The crumpled rectangles were strewn everywhere: on the pavements, embedded in other buildings, the lighter ones floating in the Trine’ba. Thick insulation blankets were flapping freely off the naked structural girders. Roofs were skeletal outlines, almost completely devoid of their solar panels. Strangest of all was the sparkle. The whole town glittered under a coating of prismatic rainbows. Each and every window in Randtown had shattered, flinging out splinters and granules in long plumes that fell across the pavements and streets, as if sacks of diamonds had been spilled out.

Mark stopped the pickup on Low West Street, barely a couple of hundred meters off the highway. “My God, I didn’t know there was this much glass on the whole planet, let alone here.”

“Can the tires take that?” Liz asked. She was looking along the street, trying to see if anyone was around. Several pillars of smoke were rising over the broken roofs, closer to the center of town.

“Should do. They’re gelfoam.”

“Okay then.” Liz brought the handheld array up to her mouth. “Carys, we’re going in. Can the MG handle this?”

“MG will be having a nasty talk with my lawyers if it doesn’t.”

Mark leaned out of the side window. David and Lydia Dunbavand were riding in the back, sitting on the bags of camping gear; while all three of the Dunbavand kids were squashed into the MG with Carys. Behind that, the Conants’ four-by-four was acting as rear guard; Yuri had fixed it when they arrived at their homestead.

“Going in,” he called back to them.

David brought his maser wand up. “Okeydokey, we’ll keep sharp.”

Mark shook his head as he toed the accelerator. What was it with disasters and people with guns? The pickup moved forward slowly, its big tires making a constant crunching sound on the road’s crystalline coating.

They found the residents as they got closer to the center. Almost everyone caught outside during the blast was injured to some degree. People walking along the pavements had been badly wounded by wall panels slicing through the air. Those who avoided the panels had been inevitably caught in the shotgun bombardment of glass. A lot had suffered both kinds of impacts.

As they approached the top end of Main Mall the road was jammed solid with parked vehicles. Mark braked the pickup, and they all got out to walk. “Leave Panda inside,” Liz told the children. “She can’t walk on this, her paws will be shredded.”

The dog started barking piteously as they left the vehicles behind.

Half of Main Mall’s buildings were bent over at perilous angles, their structural girders pushed beyond their tolerance-loading by the ferocity of the air that had surged against them. The town’s commercial heart had been busy at the time, with the cafés full of people having leisurely lunches, pavement tables crammed full, the street packed with window shoppers.

“Oh, Jesus God,” Mark groaned as he took in the sight. He felt dizzy and faint, needing to hold on to the nearest bowed wall for support.

It wasn’t the people still lying there. Nor the teams working to free the remaining trapped victims. Not the triage teams bandaging up the cuts and lacerations. Even the dreadful wailing and moaning he could have withstood. It was the blood. Blood covered everything. The pavement slabs weren’t even visible through the clogging burgundy fluid that had run down the whole length of the slope. The piles of glass were mushy with it. Buckled walls were caked in atrocious splatter patterns that had already darkened to black. People were soaked in it, their skin, their clothes. The air was thick with its tang-stench.

Mark bent double and vomited over his boots.

“Back,” Liz ordered the children. “Come on, back to the pickup.”

She propelled the kids along. Lydia and David hurried to help. Sandy and Ellie and Ed were all crying. Barry and Will looked like they were about to. The adults formed a little protective curtain, pushing gently.

“We’ll find out if there’s any sort of plan around here,” Carys called after them.

“Okay,” Liz said. She was fighting her own revulsion. “Stay in touch.”

“How about you?” Carys asked Mark. “You okay?”

“No I’m goddamn not.” He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Jesus!” The shock had turned him cold. He hadn’t expected this. The end of the world was supposed to be final, an infinite nothing. That would have been a blessing. Instead they had to endure the aftermath, a world of pain and gore and suffering.

“You’ll cope,” Carys said unsympathetically. “You have to. Come on, let’s see if we can help.”

Yuri Conant helped Mark stand straight. He didn’t look too good, either. Olga had a cloth pressed firmly over her mouth; above it her eyes were damp.

The four of them made their way down Main Mall, boots making a vile slushing sound at each footstep. Things clung to their soles. Mark got a rag out of his overalls, and tied it over his nose and mouth.

“Mark?” a girl called.

It was Mandy from Two For Tea. She was one of a little group clustered around a middle-aged man whose leg was badly torn. Makeshift bandages had been wrapped around the wounds, already heavily stained. A rough spike of rusty metal was sticking through the cloth, obviously deeply embedded in his flesh. One of the women was trying to get him to swallow painkillers.

“Are you hurt?” Mark asked her. Her face was filthy with grime and flecks of dry blood, with clear lines of skin on her cheeks where the tears had rolled. Her arms and apron were covered in blood.

“Some cuts,” she said. “Nothing bad. I’ve been trying to help people ever since.” Her voice came close to cracking. “What about Barry and Sandy, are they all right?”

“Yeah, they’re fine. It wasn’t so bad out in the valley.”

“What did we do, Mark? Why did they do this to us? We never hurt them.” She started sobbing. He put his arms around her, holding her gently. “We did nothing,” he assured her.

“Then why?”

“I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“I hate them.”

“Can you folks lend a hand here,” one of the others tending the injured man said. “We can move him now.”

“Move him where?” Carys asked.

“The hospital’s running, they got some power back. Simon took charge.”

“Where is it?”

“Two streets away,” Mark said automatically.

“We’ll take him,” Yuri said.

Even with a makeshift stretcher, it was hard going. There was so much debris to negotiate, and the Chinese restaurant on the corner of Matthews and Second Street was on fire. Without the firebots and volunteer fire service, the flames had really taken hold, threatening to spread to other buildings. They had to make a long detour down one of the alleys that branched off from Matthews. As they walked on, the light gradually grew dimmer. Clouds covered the sky, spinning in a slow cyclone formation centered around the Regents. Thicker, darker clouds were scudding in fast from the horizon. Rain was already falling at the far end of Trine’ba, a broad curtain sweeping toward the town.
At least it ought to stop the fires,
Mark thought.

A big crowd of people were milling around on the lawns at the front of the General Hospital. They parted reluctantly to let Mark’s group carry the stretcher through. Lights were on inside, and some of the medical equipment was functioning. The casualty department was already crammed with children and the most seriously wounded adults. Reception had been taken up by deep wounds and blood loss trauma. The nurse on entrance assessment took a quick look at the man they’d brought, declared him noncritical, and told them to find a place in the hallway for him. A team of people with brushes and shovels were still clearing away the shattered glass from the polished floorboards. Mark found a section they’d just cleaned, and set the patient down.

When he stood up he saw Simon Rand striding down the middle of the hallway, his orange robes hanging like ordinary cloth. Even Simon had been hit by glass; there was a long healskin patch on his hand, another on the bottom of his neck. His entourage was smaller than usual. A young woman walked beside him, dressed in a black top and jeans. It was Mellanie Rescorai, still enchantingly beautiful despite the sober determined expression locked on her face. Mark wasn’t at all surprised that she didn’t have a mark on her.

She saw him staring and offered a little rueful smile.

“Well there you go,” Carys said. “Just when you think your day can’t possibly get any worse.”

Mark trailed after Simon and Mellanie, with Carys, Yuri, and Olga following on behind. Simon reached the cracked and sagging marble portico at the front of the General Hospital, and raised his arms. “People, if you could gather around.”

The crowd on the lawns moved closer. There were a lot of dark angry looks directed at Mellanie.

She faced the crowd unflinchingly. “I know I’m not the most popular person in town right now,” she told them. “But I do have a link back into the unisphere. To give you a brief summary of what’s happening, twenty-four planets in the Commonwealth have been attacked.”

As she was talking Mark brought up the handheld array he was carrying. It couldn’t find a single network route back to the planetary cybersphere, let alone the unisphere. “No you haven’t,” he muttered.

Mellanie glanced over to him. She’d just finished telling them about Wessex beating off their assault. Her hand waved unobtrusively, fingers fluttering in a small echo of her virtual interface. Mark’s handheld array suddenly had a link to a unisphere node in Runwich; it was very low capacity, just enough to give him basic data functions. “I’m a reporter,” she said quietly. “I have some long-range inserts.”

That wasn’t right. Mark knew how networks functioned, and what she was saying was rubbish. He couldn’t puzzle out how she’d given him the link.

“Right now, the navy is organizing evacuations of every assaulted planet,” Mellanie said to the crowd. “CST’s Wessex station is arranging to open its remaining wormholes at every isolated community. Including us. It’s a difficult operation without a gateway at the far end, but the SI is helping them govern the process.”

Simon stepped forward. “It will be painful to leave, I know. But we must face reality here today, people. The hospital can’t cope. The rest of the planet is still suffering attacks of varying magnitude. Don’t think of this as evacuation, we are regrouping, that’s all. I will return. I will build my house anew. I would hope that all of you will come back with me.”

“When are we leaving?” Yuri asked. “How long have we got?”

“The navy’s drawing up a list,” Mellanie said. “We have to make sure that when the wormhole opens everyone from the surrounding countryside is here and ready to leave. We all go through at once.”

“Where are we on the list?” a voice from the crowd shouted.

Mellanie gave Simon a tense look.

“We’re number eight hundred and seventy-six,” Simon said.

The crowd was silent. Even Mark felt letdown.
But at least there is a way out.
He asked the handheld array to check if that was right, that they were truly that far down the list.

“Look at your little friend,” Carys said; her eyes were fixed on Mellanie. “She’s getting bad news.”

Mark glanced over in time to see Mellanie half turning from the crowd, hiding her face from them. Her eyes were wide with alarm. She mouthed some kind of obscenity and tugged at Simon’s robe. The two of them went into a huddle.

Mark told the handheld array to track down all official information on the current Elan situation. “No data available,” it told him bluntly.

Simon was holding his hands up again, appealing to the crowd who’d been watching him and Mellanie anxiously. “Slight change of plan,” he called above the edgy muttering. “We need to get out of town, now. If you have a vehicle that works, please drive it to the bus station. We will leave for the Highmarsh in convoy. That is where the wormhole will be opened. Can I ask all the able-bodied to help with carrying the injured to the station. Anyone with technical knowledge, we need the buses running; report to the station engineering office when you get there.”

People were starting to call out: “Why?”

“What’s happening?”

“Talk to us, Simon.”

“Tell us.”

Mellanie stood beside him. “The aliens are coming,” she said simply, and pointed at the sky behind them.

The crowd turned in unison to look at the dark rain clouds above the Trine’ba. There were two distinct patches of white fluorescence up there, as if a pair of suns were shining through. They were getting bigger and brighter.

It was the show of her lifetimes. Alessandra Baron knew nothing else would ever match live coverage of an alien attack. Thankfully she’d had the presence of mind to change out of her glamorous dress into the prim gray suit her wardrobe department kept ready for disasters and general bad news events. Now she sat masterfully behind her studio desk, perfect as moderator and guide while holograms of analysts, politicians, and junior navy officers flicked in and out of the show to answer her questions. They were interspaced with direct feeds from the assaulted planets whenever Bunny, the show’s producer, could get a decent link. The fact that the unisphere could be affected, that communications she’d taken for granted her whole lives suddenly now weren’t universal and guaranteed, troubled Alessandra almost as much as the nuclear explosions, though she kept her expression professionally impassive the whole time. And as for the shocking power losses when Wessex fought off the Prime wormholes, it brought everyone close to the battle, giving them a sense of involvement.