Xeelee: Endurance (14 page)

Pella said, ‘Maybe that’s why they’re sending manned ships. Proof against AI viruses. Surely they’ll be shielded against their own weapons—’

‘Then send them whatever else we’ve got too, with my best wishes.’

Stillich hastily assigned some of his crew to carry this through. Then he hurried out after Pella and the Admiral.

They came up in the middle of Hyde Park, under a clear August afternoon sky, military officers in gaudy uniforms, tense, sweating, armed, loaded with data desks and comms gear, emerging from a hatch in the green grass.

Pella and the others immediately got to work setting up field comms stations.

Stillich looked around, trying to take stock. The bunker entrance was near the south-west corner of the park, and through the trees he glimpsed the ruin of the Albert Memorial. Today the park was crowded, and getting more full all the time. People walked in carrying children, or bundles of belongings in cases, sheets and blankets. Some were trailed by serving bots, though many of the bots looked as if they were malfunctioning, confused.

The boundary of the park wasn’t clear, for parkland and oak forest covered much of London now; as with most of Earth’s cities it was like a garden from which buildings towered, needles so tall they penetrated a scattering of cloud. Above all that was the usual furniture of the sky, the contrails of descending spacecraft, the glittering sparks of off-world infrastructure. But even as Stillich watched, one of those tremendous buildings quivered, and shattered glass rained from its faces. The buildings themselves needed smartness to stay standing.

There was a flash in the sky, like a high explosion. Moments later a distant sonic boom rumbled. People ducked, cowering from the sky.

‘It’s that damn Alphan warning,’ said Admiral Kale. ‘It’s scared them all out of their homes. But this is a city of millions. Where are they supposed to hide?’

Stillich said, ‘That warning was sent by planetary colonists. They live under domes, in towns of a few hundred, tops. I’ve seen them. The Empress was relying on their consciences, to have them spare the cities. But what do they know of cities? Maybe they can imagine conditions on Mars or Titan. How can they imagine
this
?’

Kale said, ‘I wish there was something we could do for these people. Organise them. I feel helpless standing here.’

‘We’ll have to leave that to the civilian police,’ Stillich said.

People were again raising their faces to the sky. Something else, then. Stillich looked up.

Suddenly the bright blue air was full of sparks that flared and died. A streak of light cut across the sky, and there was a rippling boom of shocked air. Battle was joined, then.

‘Sirs.’ Pella called them over. ‘We’re getting some joy. The optic-fibre net is mostly intact, and some of our data desks stayed free of the viruses. The information flow is patchy. We’ve sent up another couple of recon satellites to replace those we’ve lost.’

‘Damn it, woman, get to the point. What’s happening?’

‘It’s the comet, Admiral. You were right, Captain.’

That stray comet, buried deep in the heart of the Solar System, had burst, transforming in a flash into a shoal of kinetic-energy weapons – dumb missiles but massive, fast-moving, and precisely targeted.

‘They’ve been hitting us off-world,’ said Pella. ‘Obviously we’re vulnerable wherever there’s no decent atmospheric cover. Mars, the big dome over Cydonia. They targeted the Serenitatis accelerator on the Moon, for some reason. There is what appears to be a shoal of the things heading out to Titan, Port Sol – we may be able to intercept some of them – the smart plague isn’t helping us deal with this, of course.’

‘A crude tactic, but effective,’ the Admiral said. ‘And Earth?’

The battle was visible in the sky. The comet bombs had first targeted the off-planet infrastructure. Space-elevator beanstalks had all been snipped, and orbital power nodes, resource lodes and comms satellites were being smashed. Earthport, the wormhole Interface cluster, had been particularly heavily targeted. In with the dumb bombs there was a scattering of high-yield nuclear devices, emitting electromagnetic pulses to disable anything too small to be targeted individually.

And a second wave of the comet-ice bombs was now raining down into the atmosphere, hitting power facilities like dams and the big orbital-power microwave receiver stations, transport nodes like harbours, air-, space- and seaports, bridges, road and rail junctions, traffic control stations . . .

‘There haven’t been too many casualties yet,’ Pella said. ‘Or at least we don’t think so. Some collateral stuff, where dams have come down, for instance. Meanwhile the smart plague has hit monorails and flitters and orbital shuttles; all over the planet you have stuff just falling out of the sky.’

‘They’re disabling us rather than killing us,’ Stillich said.

‘Looks that way,’ growled the Admiral. ‘I should have listened to you about that damn comet, Captain. You must be sick of being told you were right.’

Pella held her hand up. ‘Wait. There’s another of their messages coming through.’ She touched her data desk, and the same booming male voice, with its flat Alphan accent, sounded out. ‘. . . free citizens of Alpha System and the inhabited stars have no quarrel with the people of the Solar System, but with your government. We mean this final strike to be a demonstration of our capability. Please take all precautions necessary, especially along the North Atlantic seaboard. The free citizens of Alpha System . . .’

Pella looked at Stillich nervously. ‘What “final strike”?’

There was a burst of light in the west, like a sudden dawn. Again everybody flinched.

‘Call a flitter,’ Stillich snapped at Pella.

‘Sir—’

‘Do it! Get us out of here. And find a way to get a warning to the Empress in New York.’

S-day plus 3. The Solar System.

They hung a huge Virtual globe of the Earth in the lifedome of the
Freestar
, Flood’s flagship. The crew watched the disaster unfold, mouths slack in awe.

The Atlantic impactor had been the biggest single chunk of the comet, but it had been as precisely targeted as the rest. It came down in the middle of the ocean, on a continental-crust formation ridge about a thousand kilometres south of a small island called Iceland. As seen from space, a fireball blossomed, clinging to the carcass of the planet like a boil. A shock wave spread out through the cloud layer, a reflection of a ring of waves spreading out across the ocean, a water ripple dragging a wall of cloud with it. The ocean wave was barely visible by the time it approached the land, at Newfoundland to the west and Ireland to the east. But it mounted quickly as it hit the shallowing bottoms of the continental shelves, the water forced up into a heap, becoming a wave with the volume and vigour to smash its way onto the land. All around the basin of the North Atlantic the steel-grey of the ocean overwhelmed the greenish grey of the land, the complexities of coastal topography shaping the water’s thrusts.

As the Alphans watched, continents changed shape.

Beya was Flood’s eldest daughter. At twenty-five years old she had become one of his most capable officers. She watched the diorama in shock, as it was repeated over and over. ‘I heard garbled reports from the surface. In some of those lands around the rim of the ocean, before the wave came, they said there was salt in the rain. You know, when I heard that, I didn’t know what “rain” was, exactly. I had to look it up.’ She laughed. ‘Isn’t that strange?’

‘This is a demonstration,’ Flood said grimly. ‘The people of Earth know that far larger impactors have battered the planet in the past, causing vast pulses of death, even extinction. This will show them that we want victory, not destruction – but we hold destruction in our hands. This will work on their imaginations.’

‘Well, it’s working on mine,’ Beya said. ‘Dad, I never saw an ocean before. A moon-full of liquid water, just sitting there without a dome! Earth is alive, you can see it, not some lump of rock.’ She felt – not triumphant – bewildered. ‘And now we’ve hurt it.’

‘We were never going to be able to loosen the eight-hundred-year grip of the Shiras without being strong.’

‘But they will never forgive us for this,’ Beya said.

‘It’s necessary, believe me.’ He reached for her shoulder, then seemed to think better of it. ‘Any news of the Second Wave, the comet crew?’

‘Nothing was left of the comet, it seems.’

‘Maybe the imperial military got to it. That’s one ship I’m glad I wasn’t on, I must say.’ He glanced over, to see the Earth running through its cycle of trauma once again. ‘Shut that thing down,’ he called. ‘It’s time we considered our own fate. Look, we broke through their outer perimeter without a single loss. In twelve hours we make perihelion. We’ve all got work to do. Tomorrow, it’s Sol himself!’

S-day plus 4. Solar orbit.

The Thoth habitat was a compact sculpture of electric-blue threads, a wormhole Interface surrounded by firefly lights. The surface of the sun, barely twenty thousand kilometres below the habitat, was a floor across the universe.

Thoth was nine hundred years old. Its purpose had always been to monitor the sun, through the eyes a unique observer deep inside the star itself, an observer whose life Thoth maintained. And all his long life Thoth had been home to Sunchild Folyon, leader of the little community who maintained Thoth, a legacy from the past, held in trust for the future.

But now the rebel fleet was approaching its perihelion, and Thoth’s most significant hour since its construction by Michael Poole was almost upon it.

After prayers that morning Folyon went straight to the habitat’s bridge, where, even through the prayer hours, shifts of sunchildren maintained watch over Thoth’s systems and position. The mood on the bridge was tense, for the wormhole that reached from this station into the heart of the sun had been shut down for twenty-four hours already, a time unprecedented in Folyon’s memory; maintenance downtimes were usually measured in minutes.

But this was an extraordinary moment, which required extraordinary measures, as the Empress Shira herself had patiently explained to Folyon – and as he himself had then had to relay to a reluctant Lieserl, deep in the belly of the sun. This was total war. Every resource available to the Empire had to be dedicated to the fight – and that included even Thoth and its ancient community. After all, even Thoth had been infected by the smart plague.

So Thoth’s orbit had been carefully lifted from equatorial to a higher-inclination plane, into the path of the invasion fleet. And the wormhole had, for now, been cut.

The sunchildren had fulfilled their duties to the letter. But Folyon, conditioned since childhood to dedicate his life to a single goal, had found it hard to accept this distortion of his deepest imperatives. Not wishing to exacerbate the crew’s difficulty by displaying his own qualms, he left the bridge and made for the observation deck. As so often, he dealt with his troubles by immersing them in the healing light of the sun, giver of life.

The sun was a flat, semi-infinite landscape, encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere – the thousand-kilometre-thick outer atmosphere – a thin haze above it all. The sunscape crawled beneath the habitat slowly, but that slowness was an artefact of scale, a collision of human senses with the sheer bulk of the sun; in fact in its orbit Thoth was travelling at five hundred kilometres a second. Folyon knew how privileged he was to spend his life in the domain of the mighty star, the physical and philosophical core of human culture. At the prayer hours he would look away to the distant stars, and he imagined every human eye, even across interstellar distances, turned to the sun, towards him.

But he wondered how many of them even knew of the habitat’s existence, or its purpose.

Lieserl, who had briefly been human, was a monitor, sent long ago into the sun to investigate a complex, dark-matter canker that seemed to be building up at the star’s heart. Thus, deep below Thoth, tracking its orbit, the tetrahedral Interface of a wormhole was suspended in the body of the sun. Searing-hot gas poured into its four triangular faces, so that the Interface was surrounded by a sculpture of inflowing gas, a flower carved dynamically from the sun’s flesh. In normal times this solar material would spew from the wormhole mouth cradled by Thoth, to dissipate harmlessly. The wormhole was a crude refrigeration mechanism, by which solar heat was pumped away from the fragile human-built construct that housed the soul of Lieserl, and enabled her to survive in the sun’s fire. And it was all for a higher goal.

Thoth’s purpose, and Lieserl’s, predated even the ancient Empire of the Shiras, but, hastily designated as a temple to Sol, it had always been maintained faithfully by the Empresses’ lieutenants. Now Lieserl’s wormhole was to be used as a weapon of war. But even this remarkable incident, Folyon knew, would in the long run be just another episode in the greater history of Thoth and Lieserl, and Sol itself.

A young woman touched his arm. His thoughts, as so often, had drifted away from the here and now. Sunchild Mura said, ‘The time is close, sun-brother.’

‘All goes well on the bridge?’ He felt anxious.

Mura was empathetic for a girl of her age and she knew his moods. ‘Everything is fine. If you were there you would only distract them all, forgive me for saying so, sun-brother.’

He sighed. ‘And so we go to war.’

‘They tell me you can see it from here. The fleet.’ She scanned around the sky – the solar light passed to human eyes by the observation deck blister was heavily filtered for safety – and pointed to a cluster of star-like points, far away above the sunscape. ‘There they are.’

The lights grew in size and spread apart a little; Folyon saw now that they were splinters, like matchsticks, each with blazing fire at one end. ‘An enemy fleet from Alpha Centauri, come all the way to the sun. How remarkable.’

Mura counted. ‘Five, six, seven, eight – all accounted for. And their GUTdrives are firing.’ This was celestial mechanics, Folyon knew; if you sought to enter the Solar System, perihelion was energetically the most advantageous place to dump excess velocity. ‘They will come near us; the projections of their trajectories are good,’ Mura said, sounding tense. ‘And they will come on us quickly. The moment of closest approach will be brief. But our response systems are automated – the reopening of the wormhole won’t rely on human responses.’ She hesitated. ‘Did you tell Lieserl what is happening today?’