24

Carys Panther took the metallic-grey MG metrosport into New Costa Junction, then drove it straight onto the car-carry train to Elan. The carriage was completely enclosed, a tube of aluminium with a bright polyphoto strip along the ceiling and a couple of narrow windows along each side. Her MG was so low-slung they were above her eye level. The car’s drive array edged her right up to a big BMW 6089 4x4 before engaging the full brake lock; a Ford Yicon saloon pulled up behind her.

She ordered the seat to recline and settled back for the trip. Her e-butler brought up a whole raft of story ideas and plot sequences into her virtual vision, which she started to fill in, joining them together in complicated loops. At the moment there was a big demand for the long, slightly fantastical sagas which were her preferred genre. Ant, her agent, was keen to exploit the market. He said that it was the uncertainty of the Prime situation which was putting people off gritty realism at the moment; they wanted escapism. He should know. Ant was actually older than Nigel Sheldon, and he’d been doing the same job for century after century. He’d seen every creative fad there was, living through the fashion cycle as it spun the genres around and around.

It was twenty minutes before the train started to move forwards, pulled by an electric Fantom T5460 engine. Augusta led straight to New York. From there the trans-Earth link took them to Tallahassee, Edmonton, Seattle, LA Galactic, Mexico City, Rio, and Buenos Aires, before finally crossing the Pacific to Sydney, which routed the train out to Wessex. Earth took about an hour and they stopped at five of the stations so more vehicles could roll onto the car-carry. Once they reached Wessex, there was a longer stop as six extra carriages were added, then it took five minutes to cross the planetary station’s yard to the Elan gateway. A minute later and they were pulling up alongside the long road-platform at Runwich, the planet’s capital.

The MG’s drive array connected itself to the city’s roadrouting manager, paid the local car tax, and drove through the outskirts to the airport. For once the connection timing worked out in practice the way it was listed on the timetable. A Siddley-Lockheed CP-505, a big six-duct-fan plane, was waiting for her on the apron. She drove up the rear ramp into the gaping cargo hold, where electromuscle clamps gripped the car’s tyres. There were another fifteen cars in there, along with two coaches. The plane could carry sixty-five tonnes of cargo in total, in addition to a hundred and twenty passengers on the upper deck.

Carys spent the next three hours sitting in a comfy first-class seat being served champagne by a nice first-life steward as they cruised across the equator at .95 Mach. Ant called twice for script conferences, and permission to crank up her contract negotiations. It was sort of flattering that he dealt with her personally; his client list had been closed for over a century now. If all went well her latest saga should hit the unisphere in another six months.

They landed at Kingsclere airport, on Ryceel, and she climbed back into the MG. As she drove out of the southern continent’s capital she could see the Dau’sings rising out of the horizon.

The toll booth at the start of the Randtown highway had a big new sign across the front, reading: No Military Vehicles Permitted. Someone had spraypainted Death To Anti-Human Fuckhead Traitors over the top of it in glowing orange.

‘This should be fun,’ she muttered as she drew up outside the booth and put her thumb credit tattoo on the pad. The reinforced barrier slid up, and she drove onto the start of the highway. The broad strip of enzyme-bonded concrete seemed completely deserted as it stretched out ahead. Carys though it looked like the start grid of some giant race track, which was an interesting challenge. She brought the full range of drive-array program tools up into her virtual vision, and supervised its integration with the highway’s simple traffic management system. The speed regulator was a small old program that was easily susceptible to the fix that came as standard in the MG’s modern aggressor routines. She removed the offending soft-ware’s inconvenient monitoring of the car, and pressed her foot down hard on the manual accelerator.

There was a surge of power into the axle engines which pushed her deep into the seat. She locked the speed, tied the radar and navigation functions into the steering program, and assigned full control to the drive array. Electromuscle bands in the tyre walls responded to the build-up of speed by changing their profile, expanding the tread width to provide an even greater degree of traction. There was a wicked smile on her face as the car charged up the first slope into the foothills at three hundred kph.

*

‘I stayed loyal,’ Dudley Bose said. ‘I was stupid. Did you hear what I said? Did you ever see the recording? I warned them, I told them to flee. Then my voice ended. The aliens must have silenced me, punished me for spoiling their plans. And all the while it was Wilson Fucking Kime I was risking my neck for. The bastard who left me there to rot, to die under an alien sun. Who sacrificed me so he could be safe.’

‘You are very much alive, my love,’ Mellanie told him. They were lying together on the double bed in what the hotel, with a sharp eye for satire, called its bridal suite. The curtains were open, allowing Dudley to see his precious stars. It was an effort for Mellanie not to yawn. She desperately wanted to go to sleep. Something this new Dudley Bose apparently never did without the help of strong drugs. She wondered if she should slip another of the pills into his drink; it was nearly three o’clock in the morning. But the champagne they’d so eagerly guzzled down earlier was flat now, and not even the Pine Heart Gardens, Randtown’s finest, would offer room service at such a time. Damn this wretched backward place.

There had been few choices other than returning to Rand-town to file her follow-up report on the blockade. Alessandra wanted to know if the residents had renounced their anti-human stance now the wormhole detector station had been forcibly installed in the Regent Mountains above the town. The angle they were going for was a remorseful population who were turning their backs on redneck buffoons like Mark Vernon. Finding appropriate interviews would be easy enough for Mellanie, the more colourful the better.

She didn’t want to do it, not just because she despised Randtown and its smug small-town mentality. The Myo case was far more important to her. If she could crack that she wouldn’t even need Alessandra as a patron any more. But it was proving difficult. After the glorious fiasco of the navy’s welcome back ceremony, she’d spent a day and a half locked in her hotel room with Dudley Bose, providing him with the kind of sexual marathon that most men only knew of from pornoTSIs or their own mid-life-crisis dreams. He’d told her nothing. He’d talked continuously – between the physical feats she performed for him – but it was the same topic every time: himself and whether he was still alive out there at Dyson Alpha. The occasional respite came in the form of diatribes against Wilson Kime, his ex-wife, and the navy in general. His memories were still too chaotic to provide her with anything useful.

She’d almost left him back there in the Nadsis hotel on Augusta when it came time for her to catch the train to Elan. Almost. Some nagging doubt, which she hoped was her burgeoning reporter’s intuition, was all for perseverance. She was sure he knew something that could help; though she had started to wonder if she was being too clever in her interpretation of Myo’s remark.

So she’d finally called Alessandra to admit to making no progress on Myo, and had to endure her mentor’s stinging superiority. Mellanie promptly told Dudley they were going to spend a weekend at a secluded resort town she knew of where she was going to make his hottest dirtiest Silent World fantasies come alive. It would be her last chance to try and sort out what he knew that Myo wasn’t telling her. He’d followed like a docile child.

‘But am I alive back there?’ Dudley pointed weakly to the bridal suite’s open window.

‘No. There’s only you. You are unique. You must learn that, and to stop worrying about your old life. It ended. This is a fresh start for you. And I’m here to make it as pleasurable as I can.’

‘Goodness, that’s the Zemplar cross formation.’ Dudley rolled off the bed and padded over to the window. He pushed it open and stuck his head out. The fresh breeze coming in off the Trine’ba made Mellanie shiver on top of the bed.

‘You never told me we were here,’ Dudley said.

‘Where? Randtown? Yes I did.’

‘No, Elan. This has to be Elan. I’m right, aren’t I?’

‘Yes, my love, this is Elan.’ She was impressed; the memory transfer had obviously worked flawlessly. It was just his personality which hadn’t survived the procedure intact. ‘Now please close the window. It’s freezing.’

‘This is about as close as you can get to Dyson Alpha, apart from Far Away.’ His head was still outside, muffling his voice.

‘Yes.’

‘That’s where the Guardians come from, you know.’

‘I know.’ She searched round for the quilt, then stopped. ‘Do you know about the Guardians?’

‘A bit. It was only the once.’

‘What was?’

He turned from the window and looked down bashfully. ‘We were burgled. Eventually, we found out it could have been the Guardians. The Chief Investigator reckoned the whore I was married to had met Bradley Johansson himself.’

‘Which Chief Investigator?’ Mellanie asked, trying to sup-press her trepidation.

‘The strange one from the Hive, Paula Myo.’

Mellanie flopped down onto her back, and raised both fists triumphantly in the air. ‘Yes!’

‘What is it?’ he asked nervously.

‘Come here.’

She fucked him. As always he was supremely easy for her to control. If she let him he would climax in seconds, so she was strict, drawing him out, provoking and denying in equal amounts so that it would last as long as she wanted. This time it was different for one thing, this time she allowed herself to come as well. There was no faking it, no sound effects. It became her selfish celebration, he was there for her pleasure.

He must have known something had altered, sensed some change in her. His gaze as he lay there on the bed afterwards was worshipful. ‘Don’t leave me,’ he pleaded. ‘Please, don’t ever leave me. I couldn’t take that. I couldn’t.’

‘Don’t worry, my love,’ she told him. ‘I haven’t finished with you yet. Now be good, and take one of your sleeping pills.’

He nodded, anxious to please, and washed one down with the remnants of the champagne. Mellanie plumped up the pillows and sank back, smiling at the ceiling. For the first time in four days she fell into a deep contented sleep.

*

Mark was out in the vineyard with one of the autopickers which was stalled. Barry and Sandy were with him, keen to help the repair operation. Their assistance came in the form of charging up and down the rows, with the dog barking excitedly as it dodged between them. The big gangling machine had come to a halt halfway down its third row when its control software realized that the grencham berries weren’t sliding through the central hopper. Its octopus-like picking arms had frozen in various stages of removing clusters from the vines.

This was only the third day of picking the crop. Already he’d had two breakdowns in his own vineyard. Calls from neighbours to help out with mechanical problems were coming in with increasing frequency and desperation. He slithered into the gap between the leafy vines and the side of the machine, unclipping the loader mechanism inspection panel. Just like before, lengths of the vine had gone down the hopper to wind themselves around various cogs and rollers. It was the clippers on the end of the picker arms that were hauling them in. Same as everything in life when you got down to it: a software problem. He’d have to write a discrimination fix in time for next year. In the meantime, it was a simple pair of secateurs that had to chop at the stringy vines, then human hands which pulled them out. Mashed grencham berries made the whole process slow and gooey.

‘Look at that, Dad,’ Barry called.

Mark pulled the last few shreds of vine from the feeder mechanism, and looked up. Someone was driving along the valley’s packed stone road at a ridiculous speed. A low grey vehicle producing a long swirling contrail of dust behind it.

‘Idiot,’ he grunted. The inspection panel clipped back into place; he gave the locking pins a few thumps with the top of his medium pliers to secure them. His e-butler gave the autopicker array a resume operations order, and the arms slowly stretched out again. Clippers snicked at the top of clusters. The movements began to speed up. Mark nodded in satisfaction, and pulled his sunglasses out of his overalls pocket.

‘They’re coming here, Dada,’ Sandy yelled out.

The car had slowed to turn up the drive into the Vernons’ vineyard. It didn’t look like anything a Randtown inhabitant would own.

‘Come on then,’ he told his kids. ‘Let’s go meet them.’

They ducked between vines as they ran towards the drive, calling for Panda, who was off chasing wobes, the local fieldmice-equivalents. Mark reached the end of the row, where he got a good look at the fancy car as it neared the house. Its sleek shape clued him in on who was visiting.

The MG came to a halt beside the Ables pick-up; and the suspension lowered itself back down from the extended rough-ride position so that the wheels fitted back into the chassis again. A gull-wing door opened in the side, and Carys Panther got out. She was wearing a chic panelled suede skirt and expensive hand-tooled cowboy boots, with a simple white blouse. Her dove-grey Stetson was carried in one hand.

Barry gave a welcoming whoop and rushed forwards. Sandy was smiling happily, it was always exciting when Aunty Carys visited.

‘Nice metalware,’ Mark said sardonically.

‘Oh that?’ Carys gave a dismissive wave towards the MG. ‘It’s my boyfriend’s wife’s car.’

Mark made an exaggerated appeal to the heavens. She always had to make an entrance.

*

Neither of the two housemaids who brought breakfast to the room at eleven o’clock would meet Mellanie’s gaze. They put the big trays down on the table and walked out.

‘Screw you,’ Mellanie told them after the door had shut behind them.

She started lifting the silver lids off the plates. Room service might be crap, but the kitchen was certainly four star. ‘Tuck in,’ she told Dudley.

He sat opposite her, as nervous as a schoolkid facing the principal. She could remember that sensation well enough.

‘What do you want from me?’ he asked.

‘Your story.’

‘Is that all I am, a story?’

‘We are all stories, ultimately. I want to help you, Dudley, I really do. If you can come to terms with what’s happened, you’ll be so much happier. I think I can do that for you. I really do.’

‘And us? What about us?’

She smiled cheekily, picking up a strawberry and licking it in a suitably wicked fashion. ‘You don’t think I give myself like that to anyone I don’t care about, do you?’

His answering smile was one of cautious relief. She pulled her chair round the table until she was pressed up beside him. With him watching in silent fascination she picked up another strawberry and held it delicately in her teeth. Very slowly she undid her bathrobe and pulled it open, then leant in towards him, guiding the strawberry into his mouth. He bit into it, their lips touching.

‘Oh God.’ He was trembling, his eyes damp.

‘Now you feed me something.’

Dudley held up a slim slice of pancake dripping with maple syrup. She laughed as the drops fell on her breasts, then nibbled her way up the pancake slice. Dudley leapt at her, knocking the breakfast trays across the table. She was amazed he’d shown that much restraint, and laughed as her chair went flying backwards. They both tumbled onto the floor, with Dudley tugging frantically at his own bathrobe.

He fucked her there and then on the expensive moozaki rug with orange juice leaking down on top of them from the overturned glasses on the table. Then she was pulled over to the bed and fucked again.

‘I’m going to need another bath,’ she said after he’d finally spent himself. Even though he’d done his best to lick all the syrup and juicy lolabeans off her chest and thighs she was still awfully sticky.

‘I’ll join you.’

She grinned, snuggling up against him. ‘So when did you meet Paula Myo?’

‘Before the flight,’ he said, sighing. ‘They took me out of rejuve for the interview.’

‘They did what?’

‘I was undergoing partial rejuvenation before the flight. There wasn’t time for a full one, but I was quite old, physiologically, so they were going to bring my age down as much as they could before they started my crew training. Paula Myo had me taken out. She questioned me and Wendy. I can’t remember much of what I said. It was very disorientating having the procedure interrupted. That’s why I wasn’t as young as I wanted to be when we left. Not as young as Oscar Monroe wanted, either.’

‘Don’t start putting any value on what that old lush says. You said Myo was quizzing you about a break-in.’

‘Yeah. My bitch ex talked to Bradley Johansson, who was masquerading as a reporter; he asked her about the organizations who funded my observation. The next thing we know our home was broken into and every file copied from the house array.’

‘What did Myo think the connection was?’

‘That moron Johansson believed one of the charities funding my observation was a front for the Starflyer. That’s the alien . . .’

‘I know what the Starflyer is. When did this happen, exactly?’

‘Right after the attack on the Second Chance. Myo had the authority to do pretty much anything she wanted when they gave her that case, including yanking me out of rejuve.’

‘And she’d tracked down that connection. Why?’

‘I’ve no idea. She just said she was looking for anomalies; anyone connected to the Second Chance project was reviewed. But the queer thing is that Johansson knew she’d find the connection, he told Wendy to give Myo a message.’

‘Really, what was it?’

‘Stop concentrating on the details, it’s the big picture that counts.’

‘Weird. Do you remember which charity Johansson was suspicious about?’

‘Yeah, the Cox Educational charity.’

‘Never heard of them.’ She patted his arm as she stood up. ‘You know what you’ve just been doing, don’t you?’

‘What?’

‘Talking about what happened to your previous body as if it was you. You’re starting to connect your body lives. Well done. I told you I was good for you.’ She blew a kiss at his startled young face and went into the bathroom.

The big sunken tub was filled to its rim, with a mound of soapy bubbles floating on the surface. Mellanie stepped in, sighing gratefully as she sat down in the warm scented water. She turned the nozzles on, welcoming the gentle flow of air bubbles around her body as they eased away the aches. Dudley hadn’t been gentle the last time. His desperation and fierceness had made it a lot more interesting than his usual monotonous perfunctory act.

She turned up the music and rested her head back on the rim cushions. Her virtual hand touched the SI icon. ‘I need some financial information,’ she said.

‘You know we cannot provide confidential records, Mellanie.’

‘I just need what’s on public record. It might be a little difficult to track it all down, that’s all, and I don’t want to go through the show’s researchers.’ And I can’t use poor old Paul Cramley any more.

‘Very well.’

‘The Cox Educational charity helped fund Dr Bose’s observation. How much did they give him?’

‘In total, one point three million Earth dollars; spread over eleven years.’

‘Where does their money come from?’

‘It is a private charity.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘The source of the money is not open to inspection.’

‘Okay, so who runs it?’

‘The registered commissioners are three lawyers, Ms Daltra, Mr Pomanskie, and Mr Seeton, who all work for Bromley, Waterford, and Granku, a New York legal firm.’

‘Humm.’ She ran a sponge along her legs. ‘What else does the Cox support?’

‘It contributed to over a hundred universities and colleges across the Commonwealth. Do you want the list?’

‘Not right now.’

‘Would you like the total amount of money given to the other institutions.’

She opened her eyes, suddenly very interested – it wasn’t like the SI to volunteer information. ‘Yes please.’

‘Seventy thousand Earth dollars.’

‘For each one?’

‘No. That is the total payout.’

‘Hell. How long has it been going for?’

‘Fourteen years. It shut down two years after Dudley Bose observed the envelopment. Six months after Paula Myo inter-viewed Dudley Bose.’

*

‘So, most hated man in the Commonwealth,’ Carys said with a taunting smile. ‘Quite a title. As voted for on the Maxis unisphere poll. Never guessed my little nephew would be so famous.’

Mark just grunted in response, and wormed down deeper into his favourite chair. They were all sitting round in the living room, giving Carys a taste of last year’s Ulon Valley wine before lunch.

‘Nobody here cares,’ he said. ‘It’s not important.’

‘Oh yes. It’s only relevant to us, isn’t it? Us, being decadent metropolitan types practising our intellectual snobbery over you poor country bumpkins.’

Mark shrugged, smiling. ‘You said it.’

‘Wake up and smell the coffee,’ she snapped. ‘The media is going to screw your beautiful little town into the bedrock. I know from my contacts that Alessandra Baron is already planning a follow-up. Have you tried booking a skiing holiday here for this next season? I did. They’re offering fifty per cent discounts already. Nobody’s coming.’

‘And you can fix all that, can you?’

Carys exchanged a glance with Liz. ‘You need some serious PR, Mark. And I’m the only expert you’ve got.’

‘You called her!’ Mark accused Liz.

‘You have to listen to somebody, baby. Everyone around here is being very careful not to lay any blame. To your face.’

He turned to Carys, appealing. ‘I never said it the way that interview came out. They edited me to make it sound bad.’

‘The technical term is raunching up,’ Carys said. ‘They always do it. We can use that to fight back.’

‘How?’ he said suspiciously.

‘I can get you interviewed on other shows. Live studio interviews, so they can’t mess with your message. You’ll need a lot of coaching before we let you on, and you’ll have to grow a decent sense of humour. But it can be done.’

‘I’ve got a sense of humour,’ he protested indignantly.

Carys opened her mouth to answer. There was a bright flash outside. Mark and Liz frowned in unison. There were no thunderclouds anywhere.

Out in the garden, Sandy was squealing as if she was in pain. Both parents jumped up and went through the open patio doors.

‘What’s the matter, poppet?’ Mark asked.

Panda was going berserk, barking, jumping up and down. Sandy ran to her mother, arms flung wide. ‘In the sky,’ she wailed. ‘My eyes hurt. I see purple.’

Mark’s wrist array crashed. The sky to the south-east turned dazzling white. ‘Damn, what the hell . . .’ All the autopickers had stopped. As had the tractors. Every bot he could see was motionless and silent.

The smear of silky light above the mountains was draining away to leave the normal blue sky in its wake. Then a vivid rose-gold sun climbed up from behind the peaks, its surface writhing with webs of black fire. It cast long moving shadows across the ground.

‘That’s the Regents,’ Liz murmured. ‘Oh my God.’

The new sun was rising on a stalk of brilliant raging flame. All the remaining snow on the Regents vaporized in a single violent white explosion. The tops of the mountains looked as if they were vibrating. They started to crumble just as the ferocious vapour cloud swarmed round them, obliterating them from sight.

Sandy’s shrieks reached a crescendo.

‘They nuked it,’ Mark shouted in awe. ‘They nuked the detector station.’ He watched the mushroom cloud swelling out, its colour darkening, deepening as it spread its bruised perimeter across the clean sky. Then the soundblast reached them.

*

Mellanie ordered a light salad from room service before dressing in jeans and a coal-black sweatshirt from her own fashion line. She tied her hair back in a simple loose tail, just using moisturizer on her face, no make-up. It was important she looked serious for this call.

One of the scowling housemaids brought the salad while Dudley was splashing about cheerfully in the bathroom. She spent a couple of minutes clearing up the mess that was the two breakfast trays. Mellanie gave her a twenty-dollar tip. If anything the scowl was deeper when she left.

‘Double screw you,’ Mellanie told the door.

She picked at the salad for a while, sorting out the pitch in her mind, then sat at the bureau and used the room’s desktop array to place a call to Alessandra.

Alessandra’s image appeared on the array’s screen. She was sitting in the green room’s make-up chair, a paper bib round her neck to protect her fabulous dress. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ she demanded.

‘I’m on Elan.’

‘Okay, in that case I’ll let you live. As it is, you’re this close to being fired.’ She held her hand up, thumb and forefinger almost touching. ‘Don’t ever put a block on your unisphere address code again. Now: I need your follow-up report in an hour. And it better be a prize-winner, or that tiny little arse of yours will reach orbit.’

‘I’m on to something.’

‘What?’

Mellanie took a breath. ‘Paula Myo thinks the Starflyer is real.’

‘You’re fucking unbelievable, you know that. I give you every chance, more than I’ve given anybody else, and not just because you’re good in bed. And this drivel is what you come up with?’

‘Listen! She put me on to Dudley Bose.’

‘Do you know where he is? Everybody in the biz is going apeshit trying to find him.’

‘I’ve been fucking him for information, yeah.’ She tossed her head, keeping her face expressionless as she looked at Alessandra’s image. ‘And like you say, I’m very good at it. I found something out.’

‘All right, darling, have your fifteen seconds of fame. What have you got?’

‘One of the charities that funded Bose’s observation of the Dyson Pair is a front organization. The Starflyer arranged for us to see the envelopment. It wanted us to investigate the barrier.’

‘Proof?’ Alessandra snapped.

‘The charity had secret bank account funding,’ she said, hoping to God it was slightly true, but she had to get Alessandra behind the investigation. ‘I checked through all its other donations; they’re tokens, validity in case anyone ran a quick review. And it was shut down right after the discovery. But the important thing is that Myo knew this years ago. Don’t you see what that means? All these years she never caught Johansson and Elvin, she knew all along. She might even be working with the Guardians!’

‘This is your vendetta,’ Alessandra said.

Mellanie could see the uncertainty, and pressed on doggedly. ‘But it will be your story. Give me a research team, let me work it. Hell, take charge of a research team yourself. That’s what Myo’s telling us. Us, the media. This is all public source information, verifiable if you know where to look. We can prove the Starflyer exists. For God’s sake, Wendy Bose actually met Bradley Johansson! Did that ever come out in any interview? This is real, Alessandra, I promise.’

‘I want to talk to Bose.’

‘Okay.’

The SI’s icon sprang up in Mellanie’s virtual vision. ‘Get on the floor behind the bed,’ it told her.

‘What?’

‘The navy detector network is registering wormholes emerging inside the Commonwealth,’ the SI said. ‘The Regents’ detector station is under attack. Get behind the bed, it will provide some cover.’

‘Mellanie?’ Alessandra asked, frowning.

‘I’ve got to go,’ she hesitated, not really believing. Then her virtual vision showed inserts coming on line, activated by the SI. They were systems she neither recognized nor understood.

‘We will try and remain in contact with you,’ the SI said.

‘Mellanie, there’s some kind of alert—’ Alessandra said. Her voice had risen in alarm.

Mellanie dived for the bed. There was a brilliant flash in the sky outside.

*

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 which came in from the planetary defence 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 centre 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 that CST operated in total. ‘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 which weren’t even open to general settlement yet.

Anna materialized beside him, a ghostly grey 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 defence 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 centres. 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 communication 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 de-spin procedure, eliminating the problem of precession, which had been screwing up their manoeuvring 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 kilometres above Anshun’s nightside equator, and curving round 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 bared her teeth in fury at the devastation. For her the light was carefully colour-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 in towards 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 into the force fields, straining them 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 kilometres 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 round 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 war-heads. 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 down towards the dark landscape hundreds of kilometres below. A second bar-rage of warheads detonated. This time the diverted energy was channelled into one-shot x-ray lasers, directing seventy per cent of the explosion’s power into a single slender beam of ultrahard radiation. Every remaining projectile broke apart, glowing debris flying outwards in sinister mimicry of a meteorite shower’s splendour.

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 round, 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 soft-ware 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 was firing 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 pummelling. 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 round to intercept her.

Alarms were shrieking from every bridge console. Screens threw up systems schematics as the crew and the RI tried to re-establish 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. There was nothing too critical with the star-ship’s systems. Most of the damage had been absorbed by peripherals in the life-support wheel, along with some hull ablation and tank breaches. Without the exploration and science teams they only had forty crew on board, so no one was in any immediate danger. ‘Get everyone into spacesuits,’ 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 kilometres above Anshun’s capital, Treloar. Second Chance leapt out of its centre 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 kilometres away, this time above Bromrine, a coastal city with a population of two hundred thousand, 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 and 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 round, searching for a wormhole. When one emerged, they ignited their rockets again, racing towards it at fifty gees. The standard barrage of alien projectiles barely had time to clear the worm-hole rim before they were subjected to emp assault, electronic warfare, x-ray laser pulses, kinetic impacts, and nuclear blasts. Very few of them ever 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 kilometres. 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.

*

Nigel Sheldon had been taking breakfast in his New Costa mansion when the alert from the navy detector network came through. He hadn’t been back to Cressat, his family’s private world, for the last five months; spending his time between Augusta and Earth. It was prudent, he felt, not to be too remote should anything happen, even with the blessing of modern communications. And now he was being proved terribly right.

Shielding sprang up around the mansion; communications shifted to secure links. He closed his eyes and relaxed back into the chair as the mansion’s internal shields came on, isolating the rooms. The full range of his interface inserts went on line, allowing his sensorium to absorb digital data at an accelerated rate. Combat aerobots launched from bases dotted round the outskirts of New Costa. Startled residents gaped up into the bright morning sky to see the dark shapes roaring upwards to their high-altitude patrol stations. Force fields closed off the sky behind them.

With Augusta’s defences activated, Nigel switched his attention back to the attack. His enhanced display showed the twenty-three Commonwealth planets where the alien worm-holes intruded; the wormholes themselves manifested as a tactile sensation, like pinpricks across his skin. The SI responded to his request and joined him inside the tactical simulacrum, a small ball of knotted tangerine and turquoise lines fluctuating rhythmically as they floated in the nothingness beside him.

‘That’s a lot of wormholes,’ he said.

‘Dimitri Leopoldovich always said the assault would be conducted on a large scale. This probably does not represent their full capability.’

There was a background whisper in Nigel’s greatly expanded perception as he registered the flurry of orders slipping out from the navy’s headquarters on the High Angel, coordinating sensor data and marshalling what resources they had. ‘Poor old Wilson,’ he murmured. He concentrated on several icons in a small galaxy of symbols that were hovering in the background. They moved obediently. Using the deep connections wetwired into his brain, this interface was more like telepathy than the simple virtual hands array of standard domestic interface programs.

Force fields came on around every CST planetary station in the Commonwealth. On the twenty-three worlds under attack, there was almost no warning. Local trains coming into the stations braked sharply, their engines skidding along the tracks, as they approached the implacable translucent barriers which had risen in front of them. Not all of them managed to halt in time. Several engines hit the force fields and jumped the tracks, slewing round; carriages and wagons jackknifed, crunching into each other, smashing apart, crumpling up, flinging passengers and goods across embankments and cuttings. Cars and trucks arriving along the highways were ordered to brake by traffic route management software. Lead vehicles rammed the force fields; pileups dominoed back down the roads.

Information on damage and casualties slipped into Nigel’s mind. Nothing compared to the destruction pouring down out of the sky all around them. He ignored the figures. There had been no choice; without the stations and their precious gateways there would be no Commonwealth.

The remaining stations across the Commonwealth at least allowed arriving trains over the perimeter before their force fields went up. On the highways outside, huge queues formed along every carriageway, trailing back for miles. Those people trapped on the inside settled down for a long wait, quietly thankful about which side of the force field they were on.

Nigel saw city force fields power up as Rafael started to use the navy’s new planetary defence network, overriding local civil authorities. He sent combat aerobots rocketing skywards, big machines of unmistakable military ugliness, firing as they went. Prime projectiles were blown out of the stratosphere as they descended. But the sheer quantity of projectiles allowed several to slip through to pound at the force fields. Large areas of the surrounding countryside were flattened or reduced to lakes of glass, but the force fields held.

The CST station on Wessex actually beat the navy’s detector network in alerting Nigel to the wormholes opening above that planet. When he switched his attention there he was immediately aware of Alan Hutchinson’s command programs flooding through the Wessex cybersphere as the founder of that particular Big15 world took charge of its defences. Multiple force fields came on around Narrabri, its megacity. The planet’s small tactical defence brigade was ordered to deploy around the perimeter, activating their ground-to-air interceptor batteries. Squadrons of combat aerobots launched from their silos to patrol the skies above the force fields.

Alan Hutchinson’s face flittered across Nigel’s consciousness, grinning savagely. Three of his aerobots fired their atom lasers, taking out incoming Prime projectiles as they hit the upper atmosphere.

‘Good shooting,’ Nigel said.

‘Makes a decent change from finance reports,’ was the gruff Aussie’s hearty comment.

Another salvo of projectiles shot out of four wormholes. They were answered by a battery of firepower from the planet below.

‘Thank Christ for that,’ Alan said as molten radioactive debris scudded down across the ocean. ‘We can hit back at the bastards.’ Data coming back from the other afflicted Commonwealth worlds was depressing. Other than cities protected by force fields and aerobots they were woefully unprepared.

‘You can knock out a few missiles,’ Nigel said. ‘But at this rate we’re going to lose. They have a thousand times our resources.’

‘Well gee it up, why don’t you?’

Both of them paused to observe the Second Chance fly into action above Anshun.

‘Go, Tu Lee, go,’ Nigel whispered out loud. He tried to suppress the anxiety he felt for his young descendant. Emotional distraction was the one thing he couldn’t afford right now.

Hundreds more projectiles were fired down at Wessex. Alan didn’t have enough aerobots to cover the more remote areas. Towns scattered across the continent-wide farmlands were wiped out as the Prime projectiles fell freely. ‘Mother-fuckers,’ Alan growled. ‘What threat did those people ever make?’

‘Can you see an attack pattern in this?’ Nigel asked the SI. ‘Is there a strategy? Or are they just trying to wipe us out?’

‘The planets selected imply a double target approach,’ the SI said. ‘The twenty-three outer worlds are a strong foothold into the Commonwealth; while the addition of Wessex with its gateways to phase two space planets, if successful, would allow them to occupy a huge proportion of territory, effectively eliminating the Commonwealth as a single entity, especially if they managed to occupy Earth as well.’

‘They’ll never get the Narrabri station,’ Nigel said harshly. ‘I’ll make quite sure of that.’

‘They can’t know our exact response,’ the SI said. ‘This is as exploratory for them as it is for us. The goal of securing Wessex is a logical one. They can afford to lose the venture, yet if they do obtain the gateways at Narrabri station they will have a backdoor into sixty developed worlds.’

‘What the hell for? What do they want with us?’

‘Judging by the projectile targets, we would infer they want to obtain as much human infrastructure as is practical. They are happy to eliminate the smaller civic areas to earn the larger ones. Even if they were to be repelled immediately, most of the surviving population from the twenty-three worlds under attack would have to be evacuated. The land around the cities is radioactive slag, crops are ruined, the climate has been disrupted. They are in danger of losing their H-congruous status without a huge amount of very expensive retroforming.’

‘Son of a bitch,’ Nigel grunted. ‘You’re talking genocide.’

‘Possibly.’

‘Oh Christ,’ Alan exclaimed. ‘They’ve got her.’

Nigel watched with radar and optical sensors as the Second Chance valiantly accelerated out of orbit, struggling to shake off the surrounding Prime wormholes. The starship’s brilliant plasma rockets were extinguished behind a nuclear furnace of elementary particles that inflated out across five hundred kilometres.

‘Son of a bitch,’ Nigel barked. ‘Tu Lee, you did a magnificent job. I’m so proud. And I will hear your laugh again.’

‘Goddamn,’ Alan said. ‘I’m sorry, Nigel.’

‘We can’t just sit here and take this kind of punishment,’ Nigel said. ‘We have to show them we can fight back.’

‘Admiral Kime has ordered the warships to rendezvous,’ the SI said.

‘I bet those alien bastards are quaking in their fucking boots. Whoa, three ships are heading their way.’

Wessex aerobots destroyed another salvo of projectiles. The Primes seemed to have stopped targeting the small towns dotted over the rest of the planet. Narrabri and its external districts were on the receiving end of just about every deluge now.

‘You are not getting my station,’ Nigel told them uncompromisingly. He opened a multitude of command links directly into the wormhole generator machinery of three gateways in Narrabri’s station. His secure memory store was accessed, the old memories rising out to occupy an artificial neural network, giving him all the knowledge he ever had of exotic matter, energy inverters, supergeometry, quantum math. He drew on it all, loading new directives into the machinery which generated wormholes leading to Louisiade, Malaita, and Tubuai.

Limiters and feedback dampers flashed alerts at him. Not even his control system could handle three wormholes simultaneously.

‘Could use a little help here,’ he told the SI.

‘Very well.’

Nigel let out a small breath of relief. You never could tell when the SI was going to pitch in, or just watch aloofly. He guessed this invasion might actually have flustered even the great artificial intelligence, after all Vinmar was physically inside Commonwealth space.

With the SI acting as interpreter and actuator, Nigel’s role was elevated to executive only. Under his direction the SI reformatted the internal quantum structure of the three worm-holes he’d designated. He retracted the exits from their distant gateways, turning them into open-ended fissures twisting through spacetime.

One of the Prime wormholes re-emerged above Wessex, and Nigel struck, his pseudo-telekinetic control moving icons at supersonic speed. The three CST wormhole exits materialized inside the interloper in a transdimensional intersection, creating a massive distortion that instigated huge oscillations along the alien wormhole’s energistic fabric. Power from eight of Narrabri’s nuclear power stations was pumped through the gateway machinery to amplify the instability, forcing it back toward the Prime end.

The intrusive wormhole vanished in a severe gravitational implosion, releasing a burst of ultra-hard radiation. Nigel waited, hysradar scanning space above Wessex. The Primes were down to forty-seven wormholes jumping in and out of existence. Cautions from the Malaita gateway sounded loudly, warning him that the whole machine was powering down to prevent any further damage; the excessive power loadings he’d forced through had burned out a lot of components.

‘It worked,’ he proclaimed.

‘Of course,’ the SI replied equitably.

‘Can you take out the rest?’ Alan asked.

‘Let’s find out.’

*

As far as such a thing were possible, MorningLightMountain experienced a brief feeling of trepidation as it arranged its thoughts prior to launching the expansion. The alien Commonwealth was a considerable unknown, despite the Bose memories. It remembered living there, remembered what the society was like, but had only vague notions of what its true industrial and military capabilities were. That gave cause for concern.

There were several other stars close to its home system that had planets capable of supporting Prime life. It had already opened wormholes to eight of them, sending hundreds of millions of motiles through to begin settlements. Life-sustaining planets were much simpler to spread across than the cold, airless moons, and dead asteroids of its home system. They didn’t require machines to cocoon the new settlements in a protective friendly environment. They were cheaper to establish. Already immotile groupings were amalgamating on the new planets, integrating with Morning-LightMountain’s main thought routines. In a heady taste of the future, it had now spread out to exist across hundreds of light-years.

At one time that might have been sufficient. Even the first great enemy, the unknown, would have trouble constructing barriers around so many stars. But there was more than one enemy in the galaxy. It could see what would happen when its expansion ran into the obstacle of the humans and their territory. Two incompatible lifeforms competing for the same planets and stars. MorningLightMountain knew they could not co-exist in a peaceful fashion. In fact it didn’t see how ultimately it could allow any other alien to share this galaxy, there were after all only a finite number of stars. Now it knew how, it could join every one via wormholes, it could become omnipresent. That way it could guarantee its immortality. No matter how many stars died or turned nova, it would still be alive. And the first obstacle to that was the Commonwealth; full of dangerous independent humans and their superb advanced machinery.

MorningLightMountain opened one thousand one hundred and four wormholes, aiming at the stellar coordinates which had come from the Bose memories. Some emerged very close to their targets, others were nearby, several were half a light-year or more distant. Sensors were pushed through, collecting positional data; the information was used to refine its star chart, locking the Commonwealth stars to precise locations. The wormhole exits were realigned around its initial target planets. MorningLightMountain was interested that the Bose memories were right about the human colonization patterns; the species grossly underused the worlds they settled. Their total numbers would barely be sufficient to fill one world, let alone hundreds. Individuality was a terrible weakness, multi-plying their collective greed.

Bombardment projectiles were sent through, aimed at the smaller habitation zones and the perimeter of larger ones. It found other targets, the human quantum sensors, communication webs, satellites, power grids, and guided its projectiles at them. MorningLightMountain was intending to eliminate the humans themselves whilst keeping their industrial centres relatively intact. Those that survived, it wanted to drive out of their buildings and disperse ineffectually across the unused land.

Force fields came on over the cities. MorningLightMountain hadn’t expected that, the Bose memories had no knowledge of such things. It couldn’t open its wormholes inside them. Over the immense distance it was operating, positioning them within two thousand kilometres of a planet was as precise as it could get. For precise exits, it needed gateways to anchor the wormholes.

Small flying machines, aerobots, rose up around the cities, shooting its projectiles. MorningLightMountain had no choice, it increased the number of projectiles it was sending through, guiding them to create the maximum damage.

When it opened the wormholes above the major world, Wessex, it encountered even stronger resistance. It could see down onto the megacity which was two-thirds industrial facilities. The scale surpassed most of its own planet-based settlements, while the efficiency of the human systems with their electronic controllers went beyond anything it had achieved.

A human starship flew above Anshun, knocking out dozens of bombardment projectiles. MorningLightMountain’s response was standard, it sent through more projectiles. When the human starship began to fall in and out of its own wormhole, MorningLightMountain diverted more immotile groupings to concentrate on its own wormhole generator mechanisms, shifting the energy composition to act as an inhibitor. Tens of thousands of additional immotiles focused on the problem, taking its control ability to the absolute limit. With the starship restricted to real space, it fired an overwhelming salvo of projectiles.

Something happened to one of its wormholes above Wessex. Energy surged along the disintegrating fabric of the distortion, overloading the generator mechanism that was built on one of the four giant asteroids which orbited the interstellar wormhole at the staging post. The resulting explosion knocked out the tower storing the bombardment projectiles, and even reached out to the squadron of ships waiting above it.

MorningLightMountain urgently searched through its memory of the event. As it did, another two wormholes collapsed, their energy flashbacks wrecking the generators. MorningLightMountain realized they were actually being over-loaded by an external force. It switched more immotile group clusters to the problem, increasing the power to the remaining generators to counter a further five attempts at destabilization.

The struggle evolved into a contest of power capacity. MorningLightMountain was powering its wormholes from magflux extractor disks dropped into the staging post star’s corona, transferring the induced power to the asteroids via a small wormhole. Even with those providing maximum output, there was a limit to how much the wormhole genera-tors themselves could handle. And the humans were changing their methods of attack with a speed it could not match, modifying interference patterns and resonance amplification in nanoseconds. They, too, seemed to have unlimited power to draw on.

A further twenty-seven wormhole generators either exploded or twisted into molten ruin. MorningLightMountain ended its attempted capture of Wessex, diverting the remaining wormholes to the other planets where there was no interference. The results of the bombardment projectiles were disappointing on most of them. But the human defences were slowly being beaten back by the sheer quantity of projectiles it was firing through. It halted the projectiles, and flew the first ships through into the Commonwealth.

Altogether, it had gathered a fleet of forty-eight thousand ready for its preliminary expansion stage.

*

It was getting crowded at the centre of Wilson’s tactical display. The ghostly image of Elaine Doi herself had joined him, along with Nigel Sheldon, their spectral presence giving his orders supreme executive authority – providing they didn’t interfere. To advise on tactics and technology he had the shades of Dimitri Leopoldovich and Tunde Sutton floating in attendance behind him.

Right now he would have welcomed a genuine spook, a psychic who could tell him what was coming next, or at least take a good guess. They were watching the last of the Prime projectiles rushing down over twenty-one besieged planets – he considered that ominous while everyone else was overjoyed. Wessex had successfully banished the alien wormholes; while Olivenza and Balya had dropped out of the unisphere when their station force fields were breached. The CST planetary station on Anshun had switched off their connecting gateways.

‘Can’t you overload the remaining alien wormholes?’ Doi asked Nigel. She was keen for further victories.

‘I burned out eighteen of our wormhole generators taking out thirty of theirs,’ Nigel said. ‘Do the math. That’s not a good ratio. Without wormholes we don’t have a Commonwealth. In any case, I doubt we have enough power reserves right now.’

Wilson said nothing. He’d watched helplessly as Sheldon sucked more and more power out of the Commonwealth power grid. All of the Big15 worlds had switched to niling d-sink reserves as their nuclear generators were called on. Earth had suffered an unprecedented complete civil power loss as Sheldon diverted the entire lunar output to support his space-warping battle above Wessex. Every other world in phase one and two space had experienced blackouts and brownouts as their domestic generators were put on front-line duty. For a while it had been touch and go and several city force fields had flickered alarmingly from the power loss. Right now everyone was busy recharging their storage facilities.

It had been a desperate exercise, although, Wilson had to admit, there had been no alternative. But if the Primes had chosen that moment to launch a further wave of attacks, the results would have been catastrophic. Wilson had been reduced to praying.

‘You mean they’re here to stay?’ Doi asked.

‘For the moment, yes,’ Wilson said.

‘For the love of God, the money we gave you . . .’

‘Enough to commission three warships,’ Wilson snapped back. ‘I’m not even sure three hundred would have been enough today.’

‘The aerobots and force fields have done a damn good job,’ Rafael said. ‘Without them the damage would have been considerably greater.’

‘But the casualties,’ the President said. ‘Good God, man, we’ve lost two million people.’

‘More than that,’ Anna said soberly. ‘A lot more.’

‘And it’s going to rise,’ Wilson said, deliberately harsh. ‘Dimitri, can you give us some options on their next move?’

‘They have softened us up,’ the Russian academic said. ‘Occupation is the logical follow-on. You must be prepared for a full-scale invasion.’

‘Tunde, what’s the ecological damage level on the assaulted worlds?’

‘In a word, bad. Anshun took the worst pounding. The storms are just beginning there. At the very least they’ll spread the radioactive fall-out right over the planet. The Primes don’t use particularly clean fusion bombs. Decontamination would cost a fortune, even if it was practical – which I doubt. Cheaper to evacuate and ship everyone to a new phase three planet. The other worlds are in varying stages of climate breakdown and nuclear pollution. Given our general population’s attitude to nuclear and environmental issues, I’d say nobody will want to stay on anyway.’

‘I agree,’ Wilson said. ‘I want to begin evacuation today.’

‘On all of them?’ Doi asked. ‘I can’t consent to that. Where the hell would they all go?’

‘Friends, relatives, hotels, government camps. Who cares? That’s not my problem. We need to get everyone left alive on those planets under the force fields, then get them out. I want our military reserve shipped out there to help; every paramilitary officer, every police tactical assault squad; all the aerobots we can spare. Between them, the planetary governments have enough combat personnel to put together a reasonable-sized army. Madam President, I’ll need you to sign an Executive order putting them under Admiral Columbia’s command.’

‘I . . . I’m not sure.’

‘I’ll back you up,’ Nigel said. ‘And so will the Intersolar Dynasties. Wilson’s right, we need to get this moving.’

‘Can you get wormholes opened in the other cities on those planets?’ Wilson asked. ‘We’ll never be able to transport everyone to the capitals.’

‘Narrabri station’s gateways aren’t in great shape right now,’ Nigel said. ‘But we’ll cope. The whole goddamn train network is shut down anyway. We can divert the gateways we have left on Wessex, but it won’t be for trains. People will have to get through on foot, or buses.’

‘What about Olivenza and Balya?’

‘We can use the Anshun exploratory division’s wormhole to re-establish contact, see if there’s anyone left alive.’

‘The Prime wormholes have stopped moving around,’ Rafael said. ‘Oh, Christ on a crutch, here they come.’

Radar and visual sensors showed Prime ships flying out of the wormholes above each of the besieged worlds.

‘If they start landing, you can forget trying to evacuate anybody,’ Dimitri said. ‘There’s no time. We have to knock out their centre of operations, hit their wormholes on the other side, where they’re vulnerable.’

‘How long until the starships reach Anshun?’ Wilson asked.

‘Two are already at the rendezvous point,’ Anna said. ‘Another eight hours until the final one gets there.’

‘Son of a bitch! Rafael, start the evacuation of everyone in the capitals right away. We’ll get them clear at least.’

‘I’ll get wormholes opened to the other protected cities,’ Nigel said.

‘What about the people left outside?’ Doi said. ‘In God’s name we have to do something for them.’

‘We will see what we can do to assist,’ the SI said.

*

It took Mark forty minutes, but he eventually got the Ables pick-up working again. There was a whole load of circuitry that had burned out, stuff he managed to jury-rig or bypass. Liz and Carys spent the time packing, bringing out a couple of cases of clothes and all of the family’s camping gear.

‘I think the cybersphere is coming back,’ Liz said as she dumped the last bag in the back of the pick-up. ‘The house array is bringing up a basic communication menu.’

‘The house array is working?’ he asked in surprise. There had been a lot more than simple electronic damage. Most of the windows had blown in, even the triple-glazed ones, covering every room with shards of broken glass. Seeing what the blast had done to their home was almost as big a shock as witnessing the explosion, and infinitely more upsetting. It was as if each room had been deliberately, maliciously vandalized.

Even so, Mark reckoned they must have got off lighter than most. At least their drycoral house was all domes, allowing the worst of the blastwave pressure to slip smoothly over it; flat vertical walls would have taken a bad pounding. He couldn’t bear looking out over the vineyards; almost every row had been knocked flat. It was the same right the way down the Ulon Valley as far as he could see.

‘I can’t interface with it,’ Liz said. ‘But the back-up monitor screen in the utility room survived, so I could type in a few commands. Ninety per cent of the system has crashed, and I can’t get the reload and repair program to run. The network operation protocol is about the only thing that is there, it’s definitely hooked into the valley node. The cable is fibre optic, it can survive a lot worse than this.’

‘Did you try calling anyone?’

‘Sure. I went for the Dunbavands and the Conants first. Nothing. Then I tried the Town Hall; I even tried the Black House. Nobody’s home.’

‘Or they don’t realize the system’s rebuilding itself. It’ll take time even with genetic algorithms restructuring round the damage.’

‘They probably never will find out if their inserts are screwed like ours. Who knows how to work a keyboard these days?’

‘I do,’ Barry said.

Mark put his arms around his son. The boy still had dirt and tears smeared over his face. He seemed to be recovering from the shock, though. ‘That’s because you’re brilliant,’ Mark told him.

‘Clouds coming,’ Carys said. She was looking to the north, where long streamers of white vapor were sliding low and fast over the Dau’sings. They were like fluffy spears heading towards the smog-clotted remains of the Regents.

Liz eyed them warily. ‘Going to rain before long. Heavy rain.’ She turned to Mark. ‘So which way are we heading?’

‘It’s a long way to the gateway,’ he said.

‘If it’s still there,’ Carys said. ‘They used a nuke to take out a remote detector station, God knows what they hit the CST station with. And that highway is one very long, very exposed route. Then we have to cross an ocean.’

‘There’s no other way out,’ he said.

‘You know we have to check on the others,’ Liz said. ‘I want to get the children to safety, more than anything, but we have to know where safe is. And right now I’m not convinced it’s the other side of the Dau’sings.’

Mark glanced up at the sky, suddenly fearful of the sight. He’d never realized before how open it was. ‘Suppose . . . they come?’

‘Here?’ Carys was scathing. ‘Sorry, you guys, but come on. Randtown isn’t exactly the strategic centre of the universe. Without the detector station this is nothing.’

‘You’re probably right,’ Mark said. ‘Okay, we’ll head for town, and check in with a few neighbours on the way.’

‘Good enough plan,’ Liz said. ‘We need to know what’s happening on the rest of Elan, and the Commonwealth. If the government makes any attempt to contact us, it’ll be at the town.’

‘If there is a government,’ Carys said.

Liz gave her a sharp glance. ‘There will be.’

‘Into the pick-up,’ Mark told the kids. They clambered into the back seat without a word. An equally subdued Panda quickly jumped up with them. He almost ordered the dog out, then relented. They needed every bit of comfort they could get right now. All of them.

‘I’ll follow you,’ Carys said.

‘Okay. Keep your hand-held array on.’ They’d dug out three old models from the house that had been switched off when the emp washed over the valley. It had been simple enough for Mark to alter their programs so they could be used as basic communicators, giving them a five-mile range.

Carys gave a backward wave of reassurance as she made her way over to the MG. To Mark’s complete surprise and grudging respect, the sports car’s systems had survived the emp almost intact.

‘You’d better take this,’ Liz said. She handed him his hunting rifle, a high-power laser with a low-light focus lock sight. ‘I checked it, it still works.’

‘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 miles 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 pick-up, 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 upwards, but the terrible distorted pressure waves that had rushed out from the mountains had easily reached the town.

Composite and metal panelling had been twisted and torn off every building. The crumpled rectangles were strewn everywhere, on the pavements, embedded in other buildings. The lighter ones were 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 pick-up on Low West Street, barely a couple of hundred metres off the highway. ‘My God, I didn’t know there was this much glass on the whole planet, let alone here.’

‘Can the tyres 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 centre of town.

‘Should do. They’re gelfoam.’

‘Okay then.’ Liz brought the hand-held 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’ 4x4 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. ‘Okey-dokey, we’ll keep sharp.’

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

They found the residents as they got closer to the centre. Almost everyone caught outside during the blast was injured to some degree. People walking along the pavements had been badly wounded by the wall panels as they sliced through the air. Those that avoided the panels were 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 pick-up, 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 still 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 pick-up.’

She propelled the kids along and 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. Her eyes were damp above it.

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 round a middle-aged man whose leg was badly torn. Makeshift bandages had been wrapped round 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 the 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 round 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 tricky 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 centred 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 towards the town. At least it ought to stop the fires, Mark thought.

A big crowd of people were milling round 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 non-critical, 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, but they still followed him devotedly. 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 round.’

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 hand-held 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 hand-held 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 let down. But at least there was a way out. He asked the hand-held 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 hand-held 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 rainclouds 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 was ever going to 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 grey 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 had 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 worm-holes, it brought everyone close to the battle, giving them a sense of involvement.

In the studio production office, Bunny was running multiple parallel information streams for accessors, summarizing the status of events on each of the twenty-four planets. The streams for Olivenza and Balya were ominously empty and had been for some time. Alessandra’s virtual vision provided a grid of powerful images available from various reporters unlucky enough to be close to the front line. Force fields over cities, constantly flaring with shimmering opalescence as they warded off either debris or a howling radioactive hurricane. Reporters foolhardy enough to be standing close to the force field revealed the new wastelands outside; the eerily smooth craters with glowing basins surrounded by flat ground that had become a desert of midnight-black carbon. Then there were the human interest stories, interviews with terrified, barely coherent city residents as they wept. Those from outlying towns who’d made it inside the force fields in time. Those whose family and friends were still outside somewhere. All of them had their suffering and sorrow and rage skilfully woven into a story tapestry that made sure accessors could never leave.

Bunny and Alessandra played strong on one theme, always letting through the same overriding question: Where’s the navy? Time after time they replayed the spectacular nova-bright explosion of the Second Chance as she died in battle above Anshun.

The feeds from the assaulted planets made Alessandra grateful she was safe on Augusta, hundreds of light-years behind the front line. She asked Ainge about that, an analyst from the StPetersburg institute for strategic studies whose hologram was sitting beside her.

‘I think it’s significant that they’re only assaulting our worlds closest to Dyson Alpha,’ Ainge said. ‘It implies a range limit on their wormhole generators.’

‘But Wessex is a hundred light-years inside the boundary of phase three space,’ Alessandra said.

‘Yes, but from a tactical point of view it was worth the expenditure risk trying to capture it. If they’d been successful, we would have lost a considerable portion of phase two space. That would almost have guaranteed our ultimate loss. As it is, we’re going to have trouble fighting back. We know the kind of resources they have available; it could well be we never regain the twenty-three outer planets.’

‘In your professional opinion, can we win this war?’

‘Not today. We need a radical rethink of our strategy. We also need time, which is a factor very much dictated by the Primes.’

‘The navy says its warships are on the way to assist the assaulted planets. How do you rate their chances?’

‘I’d need more information before I can give you a realistic assessment. It all depends on how well defended the Prime wormholes are. Admiral Kime has to succeed in sending a warship through to attack their staging post. That’s the only way to slow them down.’

Bunny was telling Alessandra that Mellanie had come on line.

‘I thought Randtown had dropped out of Elan’s cyber-sphere,’ Alessandra said.

‘It is, but she’s found some way through.’

‘Good girl. Has she got anything interesting?’

‘Oh yeah. I’m giving her live access. Stand by.’

Alessandra saw a new grid image appear in her virtual vision. It shifted into prime feed position.

Mellanie was in some kind of open-air bus station, a big square expanse of tarmac with a passenger waiting lounge along one side. Every window had been blown out along the front of the building, with the support pillars bent and half of the solar collector roof missing. Despite how bright it was outside, a heavy rain was falling from a cloud-veiled sky. The relentless deluge was making life even more miserable for the hundreds of people swarming through the station. A full-scale exodus was in progress. Queues were trailing back from a logjam of stationary buses, the able-bodied paired with the moderately injured, helping them along. Four buses had been converted into makeshift ambulances, their seats removed and slung out to pile up beside the wrecked waiting lounge. The badly injured on crude stretchers were being carried on board; a lot of them were in a bad way, with their wounds being treated in the most primitive fashion, wrapped in cloth bandages rather than healskin.

Engineers were clustered round open hatches on the sides of the buses, rewiring the superconductor batteries. Alessandra glimpsed Mark Vernon in one repair group, working away furiously. But Mellanie didn’t pause in her establishing scan. The roads around the station were packed with 4x4s and pick-up trucks that were stuffed full of kids and uninjured adults.

‘Mellanie,’ Alessandra said. ‘Glad to see you’re still with us. What’s the situation there in Randtown?’

‘Take a look at this,’ Mellanie said in a flat voice.

Her visual sweep continued until she was looking down across the broken town. The bus station was obviously at the back of Randtown, where the ground started rising into foothills. It was a position which gave her a view out over the shattered roofs to the Trine’ba beyond. She raised her head to the mass of thick black clouds roofing the giant lake. Finally, Alessandra understood why it was so bright.

Thirty miles away, the rucked thunderclouds were sprouting a pair of radiant tumours, huge writhing bulges that were billowing downwards. She watched the base of the largest burst apart as eight slender lines of solid sunlight sliced down through it to strike the surface of the lake. Steam detonated out from the impact, sending a circular cascade of blazing mist soaring across the heaving water. The light was so intense it threw the town and countryside into stark monochrome. Mellanie’s retinal inserts brought up their strongest filters, though they could barely cope. Most of the townspeople in the bus station were cowering away from it, bringing their forearms up to cover their eyes. Screams and shouts of panic were coming from all around. They were quickly smothered as a strident roaring sound reached the town, rattling the remaining buildings. It grew steadily louder until Mellanie’s whole skeleton was thrumming painfully. The image which her retinal inserts were feeding back to Alessandra’s studio was reduced to a blurred black and white profile. Directly over Randtown the clouds were in torment, savaged by conflicting high-velocity pressure fronts. The chittering rain changed in seconds, curving with the wind to streak along almost horizontally, each drop stinging sharply as it hit unprotected skin.

‘Plasma drives,’ Mellanie screamed above the never-ending thunderclap. ‘Those are ships coming down.’

The second tumour of cloud ripped open as it was lanced by eight more incandescent spears. Mellanie finally had to cover her eyes, turning the image to a single blood-red haze as her hand came close to translucence. Even through the lashing rain, the heat pouring out of the plasma was greater than any noonday desert sun. The raindrops were steaming as they bulleted through the air.

There was a slight decrease in the light level. Mellanie brought her hand down. A ship had descended out of the clouds, a dark cone-shape riding the vivid glare of its rigid plasma exhausts. Then it vanished behind the massive wall of radiant steam gushing up from the lake.

‘Did you see that?’ Mellanie screamed raw-throated. ‘They’re coming.’

‘Get out of there.’ Eighty billion accessors saw Alessandra’s poise crack. ‘Don’t compromise your safety: run.’

‘We can’t . . .’ The image vanished in a scattering of purple static.

Alessandra froze behind the desk. She cleared her throat. ‘That report from Mellanie Rescorai, one of the most promising and talented newcomers to join our team for several years. The prayers from all of us here in the studio are with her. And now, over to Garth West, who was covering the flower festival on Sligo. What’s it like there, Garth, any sign of Prime landing ships, yet?’

*

‘Ships now approaching upper atmosphere on Anshun, Elan, Whalton, Pomona, and Nattavaara,’ Anna reported in a calm voice.

As the Prime ships reached the stratosphere, aerobots started shooting. Everyone sharing Wilson’s tactical display watched intently as the energy weapons locked on and sliced upwards. They had little effect. Wilson heard a couple of dismayed curses. The force fields protecting the descending ships were too powerful to penetrate with the medium-calibre weaponry carried by the aerobots. Then the Primes began targeting the small aggressors below them.

‘Get them out of there,’ Wilson said. ‘Regroup them around the protected cities. We’ll need them later.’

‘I’ll see to it,’ Rafael said.

‘Did we hit any of them?’ Nigel asked.

‘No sir,’ Anna said. ‘Not one; their force fields are too strong.’

‘Atmospheric entry on Belembe, Martaban, Sligo, Balkash, and Samar, Molina, and Kozani. They’re coming through the wormholes at the rate of one per forty seconds. Trajectories variable, they’re not concentrating on the capital cities. They seem to be heading for coastlines.’

‘Coastlines?’

‘Getting visual imagery.’

Various image feeds appeared in the huge tactical display. Each one showing pictures of brilliant streamers cutting across skies of varying colours.

‘They’re big bastards,’ Rafael commented. ‘Thousands of tons each.’

‘Those are fusion plumes,’ Tunde Sutton said. ‘Temperature profile and spectral signature indicate a deuterium reaction.’

‘Confirm, they’re heading for water landings,’ Anna said.

‘Makes sense,’ Nigel said. ‘Even with force fields I wouldn’t like to land one of those on solid ground.’

‘That gives us a breathing space,’ Wilson said. ‘They’re going to have to come ashore. And it will be in smaller vehicles. We might be able to get some reinforcements to the capitals and the larger towns.’

‘Last aerobots squadrons are being withdrawn from range,’ Anna said.

‘Our reinforcement is taking too much time,’ Rafael said. ‘Anybody who has any kind of military capability is reluctant to let go of it.’

‘Get your office working on that,’ Wilson told the President. ‘We have to show people we can put up a coherent resistance.’

‘I’ll talk to Patricia.’

‘You’ll need to lean on heads of state personally,’ Nigel said.

‘Very well.’ If Doi resented the bullying she didn’t show it.

‘How about the evacuation?’ Wilson asked.

‘We’re already running trains from Anshun, Martaban, Sligo, Nattavaara, and Kozani,’ Nigel said. ‘I’m shunting them through Wessex directly to Earth. After that, they’ll get allocated a final destination. All I’m concerned about is getting them clear of their origin. We’re about ready to try shutting the Trusbal gateway on Wessex and reopening it in Bitran on Sligo; there’s a lot of flower festival tourists trapped there.’

‘Any Prime ships near there?’ Wilson asked.

‘Twelve on their way,’ Anna said. ‘But Bitran is eighty miles from the coast. There should be time.’

For the next thirty minutes Wilson watched the shifting data in his display, showing him the flow of military equipment and personnel converging on Wessex. CST staff and the SI eventually managed to get the wormhole open and stable inside the Bitran force fields. Refugees stormed through on foot and in every vehicle the city had. They then became a problem for Wessex’s Narrabri station workforce, which had to direct them onto passenger trains to move them along. The sheer volume of people appearing so far away from any passenger terminus was completely outside any of the planetary station’s contingency plans. Eventually they cleared a set of rails, cordoning them off with caution holograms, and hustled everyone along the four miles to the nearest platform. Trains hurtled by on either side of them. Empty carriages going to the assaulted worlds; badly overcrowded carriages racing back. Cargo trains loaded with aerobots and armed troops from all over the Commonwealth, hurrying to reinforce the isolated cities.

As the CST managers and the SI managed to divert more gateway wormholes to the evacuation effort, so the marshalling yard turned into an ad hoc staging post. Cargo trains pulled up in sidings, and the aerobots they carried launched from there to fly through the wormholes above the heads of the refugees. Platoons of troops in bulky armour marched along, earning appreciative cheers and applause.

The first main effort was directed at Anshun’s capital, Treloar. Wilson wanted it kept intact with a functioning station so that aerobots could be channelled through and deployed around Anshun’s remaining shielded cities. Squadrons from thirty-five worlds were assigned to it, their arrival scheduled as fast as CST’s struggling rail network could deliver them.

As the first ones arrived in Treloar they flew through temporary gaps in the force field and started to spread out towards the coast. Two hundred Prime ships had already splashed down on Anshun, over a thousand more were in various stages of descent. Wilson didn’t like to think what effect that would have on the planet’s already reeling environment. But then he’d seen Dyson Alpha’s sole habitable world, and the fusion ships that swirled constantly above it. The Primes didn’t have the same priorities as humans.

‘Scouts launching from Treloar,’ Anna reported. ‘The Primes have landed just off a coastal town called Scraptoft. That’s forty miles away. Should be getting pictures any minute.’

Wilson turned to the video display relayed from the lead scout as it left Treloar. It was flying at Mach nine, its pilot array holding it steady twenty metres above the ground. Behind it, a swathe of soil a hundred metres wide was being ruptured by its furious wake, the torn air pulverizing trees, bushes, plants and the occasional building it flew over. As it neared the shoreline, hundreds of small stealthed sensor drones were ejected from the fuselage, building up a much wider image.

When it shot out over the cliff at Scraptoft, it revealed thirty Prime ships floating on the sea amid a dense swirl of agitated steam. The big cones were almost completely black, surrounded by sparkling force fields. Halfway up their super-structure, tall doorways had hinged outward to form horizontal platforms. Smaller craft were flying out of the openings, squat grey cylinders with metallic beetle legs folded up underneath. Three energy beams struck the scout, and the image vanished immediately.

The stealthed sensors scattered behind the scout watched the Prime flyers slide in over the sea, mapping their electrical, thermal, magnetic, and mechanical structure, along with their weapon and force field parameters. There were several types, some that were nothing but flying weapons platforms, while the larger ones were carrying small units of some kind that were protected by individual force fields.

‘That’s got to be them,’ Nigel muttered. Even now, he was curious what they might look like.

Combat aerobots screamed in towards Scraptoft at Mach twelve. Prime flyers arched round to intercept. The sky between them was ruptured by energy beams and explosions, turning to a huge patch of electrically charged gas. Lightning bolts flashed outward, clawing at the ground for miles around.

Eight of the big Prime landing ships coming down through the atmosphere altered their trajectory slightly. Their fusion exhausts swept across the coastline, creating instant devastation. Soil and rock melted, flowing away from the superheated beams of plasma. Waves of thick glowing vapour spewed out, boiling high above the clouds until they were pulled apart by the jetstreams. Metres above the ground, aerobots and Prime flyers alike vectored round in high-gee manoeuvres in an attempt to avoid the miasma of incendiary particles. The eight Prime landing ships were poised fifteen kilometres above Scraptoft, balanced on their drive exhausts. They started to fire their weapons, blasting the aerobots out of the sky.

Nigel watched the tsunami of filthy smog roll across the land. It was over twenty kilometres high, and spreading wide as the eight giant ships continued to hang there with their fusion fire searing into the ground. The front engulfed Treloar’s force field, smothering the dome to bring an abrupt night to the city.

Screened by the pollution, the Prime flyers began to touch down around Scraptoft’s outskirts. Stealthed sensors continued their quiet transmissions, showing what they could see through the dark oppressive vapours asphyxiating the land. A visual spectrum sensor locked on to one of the flyers that had landed in the smouldering ruins of a tourist complex. Sections of the cylindrical fuselage had opened, extending ramps. Aliens walked down, their bodies encased in suits of dark armour reinforced by force fields.

‘Taller than us,’ Nigel observed dispassionately.

‘Weird walk,’ Wilson replied. He was watching the crea-ture’s four legs, the way they bent, the curving feet shaped like a blunt claw. His gaze moved up the torso to the four arms; each one was holding a weapon. The top of the suit was a squat hemisphere divided into four sections, each one replicating the same sensor arrangement.

‘There’s a lot of electromagnetic activity around them,’ Rafael said. ‘They’re communicating with each other and the flyer on a continual basis. The flyers are in contact with the landing ships, ditto the ships that are going into orbit. The signals look very similar to the ones you recorded at Dyson Alpha.’

‘Tu Lee reported that the missiles required continual guidance updates,’ Tunde Sutton said.

‘Meaning what?’ Rafael asked.

‘Possibly, the Prime commanders don’t allow for a lot of independence on the battlefront.’

‘Okay,’ Wilson said. ‘Anna, have we got any electronic warfare systems we can deploy?’

‘There are several EW aerobots on the central registry.’

‘Good. Get them out there fast. Close down those links. Let’s see if that has any effect on them.’

*

Randtown had finally given in to panic. As soon as the alien ships had splashed down on the Trine’ba, the vehicles parked around the bus station began to move as families headed out for the perceived safety of the valleys behind the town. Horns blared in fury, their combined racket almost as loud as the ships’ exhaust. There were collisions all along the road as they made U-turns or accelerated out from the kerb where they’d been waiting.

Mark kept glancing round at the chaos as he worked with Napo Langsal on the power supply of a bus. The two of them had almost rigged a bypass around the superconductor battery regulator.

‘They’re losing it big time,’ Mark grunted.

The queue for the bus had turned into a violent scrum around the open door, and shoving had deteriorated into the first fists being thrown. He and Napo were being shouted at and threatened, anything to get the bus working.

A shotgun was fired in the centre of the bus station. Everyone paused for a second. Mark had ducked immediately, now he cautiously lifted his head. It was Simon Rand who’d fired the antique pump-action weapon straight into the air.

‘Thank you for your attention, ladies and gentlemen,’ Simon said, his loud bass voice carrying right across the station as he turned a complete circle. Even people scrambling round the vehicles outside had paused to listen. ‘Nothing has changed our immediate situation, so you will stick to the plan we drew up.’ He pumped the shotgun, the spent cartridge twirling away. ‘There are enough buses to carry everyone out, and they will leave shortly, so kindly stop harassing the engineers. Now, in order to guarantee that we can all reach the Highmarsh safely, I will require a volunteer team to stay here in town with me and act as a rearguard to allow the convoy to get a head start. Anyone with a weapon, please report to the passenger waiting lounge to receive your instructions.’ He lowered the shotgun.

‘Holy Christ,’ Napo grunted.

Mark closed the cable box, and pressed the reset button. ‘How’s that?’ he called up to the driver. The woman gave him a thumbs up. ‘You get along to the next bus,’ he told Napo.

Napo gave Mark’s hunting laser a dubious glance. ‘He can’t make you, you know.’

‘I know.’ Mark looked towards the two vast clouds of steam squatting over the Trine’ba, obscuring the ships. The surface was still reeling from their splashdown, with big waves rolling ashore, washing over the wall that ran alongside the promenade. ‘But he’s right. People need time to get clear.’

Dudley Bose gave Mellanie a panicked look as they approached the bus. The crowd was pressing in tight around them, carrying them forward.

‘Do you think there’s room?’ he asked. The bus already looked full, with people squashed into the seats, and more packing the aisle.

‘If not this one, then the next,’ she told him. ‘You’ll be fine.’

‘I . . .? What about you?’

‘I’ll grab a later one.’ She could barely see Dudley, her virtual vision was displaying so many symbols and icons. Very little of the dataflow made any sense. She’d glimpsed some standard information amid the mad rainbow swirls, which seemed to be some kind of sensor data. Her newly activated inserts were scanning the steam clouds on the Trine’ba, analysing the ships hidden inside. She was trying to remain aloof from it all, be a true impartial reporter, but the adrenaline flushing through her blood was making her heart pound away and giving her the shakes. The SI kept telling her to relax. It was tough; this most certainly was not what she’d expected when she made her deal with it.

‘No!’ Dudley cried. ‘No, you can’t leave me. Not now. Please, you promised.’

‘Dudley.’ She put her hands on either side of his head, holding him steady, then kissed him hard amid the jostling. Concentrating on calming him was subduing her own apprehension. ‘I’m not going to leave you. I promised that and I’ll keep that promise. But there are things I have to do here that no one else can. Now get on the bus, and I’ll follow the convoy.’

They’d reached the door. She let go of his head, and smiled with winning reassurance. It was a truthful smile, because there was no way she was going to relinquish her hold over him for the moment, he was her ace now, making her a real player. Though given the scary abilities the SI’s inserts were providing she was beginning to wonder if she even needed Alessandra and the show any more. She didn’t know if she could operate them independently, but just knowing they were there was giving her a kind of courage she admitted she’d never had before. Before this, she would have been first on the bus, clawing children and little old ladies out of the way.

The crowd pushed Dudley up the stairs, and she wriggled free. He looked back frantically as he was shoved along the aisle. ‘I love you,’ he bellowed.

Mellanie made herself smile at him, and blew a kiss.

Liz and Carys were waiting by the pick-up. Mark smiled and waved at Barry and Sandy who were in the back seat with Panda. ‘I’m going to help Rand,’ he said. ‘Take Barry and Sandy up to the Highmarsh.’

‘I’m with you,’ Liz said.

‘But—’

‘Mark, I really hope you aren’t going to come out with any crap about this being a man’s job.’

‘They need a mother.’

‘And a father.’

‘I can’t abandon Rand. This is our life they’re destroying. At the very least I owe the people this. Some of us have to get away, that’s the only way we can rebuild afterwards.’

‘Agreed. And I’m helping you.’

‘Carys?’ he appealed.

‘Don’t even think about involving me in this argument. But if you two crazies are going to join up with Rand’s guerrilla army I’ll take the kids out of here in the MG.’ She patted a heavy bulge in her jacket. ‘They’ll be safe with me, I promise. And we’ve got the arrays, we can stay in touch.’

Mark nearly questioned when his family suddenly became gun-toting survivalists. Instead, he gave Carys a quick kiss. ‘Thanks.’ Then he and Liz had the really difficult job of coaxing the kids into the MG, promising them Mom and Dad would be following along right behind.

*

Dark specks zipped out of the cloud that squatted over half of the Trine’ba. They arrowed round to line up on Randtown, accelerating hard.

‘They’re coming,’ Liz called.

Mark was backing the pick-up into the Ables Motors garage workshop where it would be hidden from view. David Dunbavand was standing behind the truck, helping to guide him in with shouts and frantic hand signals. Mark had never appreciated how difficult it was to drive without micro radar providing a proximity scan.

‘That’s enough,’ David said. ‘Let’s go.’ He slipped the safety off his maser wand as they left the back of the garage. Like most buildings, it had taken a pounding in the Regents’ blast. The office along the front was missing all its windows, and the external walls were shredded; but the main framework was intact. It would be easy to rebuild, given a little time and money.

That was the kind of thinking, visualizing a future of complete normality, which allowed Mark to keep going. He squatted down next to Liz behind a thick stone wall that lay along the side of the Libra Bar’s beer garden. The blast had hurled the garden’s wooden tables and chairs across the lawn, smashing them against the wall of the Zanue car rental franchise next door. There had been many summer-time evenings when he and Liz came here for a meal and a drink, sitting out in the garden with friends where they could watch the boats come and go from the quays along the waterfront.

Now they had the same clear view of the waterfront through their weapon sights. The rain had subsided to a light drizzle laced with a few slim trails of grey smoke from the dying fires. Mark could see the alien flyers skimming towards him just a few metres above the wavelets.

‘Stand by,’ Simon’s voice said from the hand-held array. ‘They look like they’re slowing. Could be plan A.’

There had been a lot of shouting about that when Simon assembled his ragtag band of two dozen guerrillas in the passenger waiting lounge. Plan A envisaged the aliens landing in the town, which would allow the guerrillas to snipe at them, slowing their advance. Plan B, the worst-case scenario, would have them flying over the town to attack the convoy directly, in which case they’d have to fire a fusillade of shots at the craft as they went overhead and hope to hit some vital component. Everyone knew that would be next to useless. As always, Simon had prevailed.

Mark looked over his shoulder. The last of the buses were visible on the highway at the base of Blackwater Crag, travel-ling far too fast for anything that didn’t have working arrays and safety systems. They only needed a few minutes more and they’d be turning into the Highmarsh.

Looking at the approaching alien flyers, Mark wasn’t convinced that the big valley was going to be the refuge Simon had claimed. In his private vision of the future, Mark had envisaged the aliens coming ashore in boats, taking days to reach the Highmarsh.

‘Carys, where are you?’ Liz asked.

‘We turned onto the Highmarsh road a couple of minutes ago.’

‘They’re in aircraft. Looks like they’re landing here, though.’

‘Okay, let me know if any are coming our way. I’ll need to get off the road fast.’

‘Will do.’

Mark glanced at the unit’s screen. Their signal was routing through the still-functional sections of the district’s network. Several nodes along the Highmarsh were operating, allowing them to extend their fragile contact around the mountains. He was pretty sure it wouldn’t last long once the aliens landed and started running sensor sweeps.

The first of the alien flyers arrived at the shoreline. It hovered just above the water, spindly metal legs unfolding from beneath its cylindrical fuselage. After a moment of hesitation it landed on the broad promenade next to the Celestial Tours quay, the aft section knocking into the wall and demolishing a five-metre length, breaking the long single line of poetry.

‘Wait,’ Simon’s voice urged them with soft confidence. ‘We need most of them down first, then we can begin our harassment campaign.’

Mark wondered where Simon had gained so much combat experience. He certainly sounded like he knew what he was talking about. More likely it was all from TSI dramas. He glanced out at the lake again, startled by just how many flyers were now heading their way.

‘Ho boy,’ David muttered.

Doors had opened on the flyer sitting next to the Celestial Tours quay, allowing aliens to lumber down.

Mark’s personal predictions had faltered at this point. But he certainly hadn’t expected anything quite so . . . robotic looking. Maybe they were robots? Watching them spread out, he quickly changed that opinion. They moved fast, heading straight for cover. Within seconds they were infiltrating the buildings that faced the promenade.

Twelve flyers landed along the waterfront. The second wave flew over to circle the town park at the back of the General Hospital before extending their legs and sinking down. Some flyers were heading towards Blackwater Crag and the start of the highway.

‘Stand by,’ Simon said. ‘Don’t expect our weapons to penetrate their force fields, aim for maximum disruption around them. And fall back immediately.’

Mark gave Liz a look. She stretched her lips wide, mimicking a smile. ‘Okay,’ she mumbled.

He carefully raised his head above the wall, and brought the laser rifle up. Several aliens were slipping quickly across the open ground of the promenade to the first line of buildings. He suspected Simon was right, his rifle wouldn’t get through that armour. Instead he shifted his aim to the buildings, wondering if he could knock out some of the framework, and collapse the roof.

Somebody else fired. He actually saw the air sparkle around an alien as the energy beam was deflected by its force field. Their response was terrifyingly swift. The Bab’s Kebabs franchise on Swift Street exploded.

Mark ducked down as smouldering fragments spun through the air. ‘Shit!’

Four of the flyers heading for Blackwater Crag turned sharply and flew back low over the town. Masers lashed down, scoring a long line of fire and vapor across the rooftops.

‘Hit them,’ someone yelled out of the hand-held array. ‘Hit them. Shoot back.’

Two more buildings exploded, sending broken lengths of framework girders spinning through the air. Composite panels cartwheeled down the street like tumbleweed. Laser shots, ion bolts, and even bullets peppered the buildings along the waterfront. The force fields around two of the overhead flyers flickered briefly with static.

‘They’ll slaughter us.’

‘Shoot them, kill them all, kill the bastards.’

The air above Mark emitted a sibilant sizzling. A line shimmered faint violet. Flames burst out of every gaping window in the Babylon Garden restaurant behind him.

‘Fall back. Get the fuck out of here.’

‘No! They’ll see us. Knock down the flyers.’

‘Where’s the convoy? Are they clear?’

‘Hey, yeah! I got one, I saw a wall fall on it. Oh shit—’

There must have been twenty buildings burning vigorously now. Three more detonated in quick succession.

‘God, no. What have we done?’

‘Simon, you motherfucker. This is all your fault.’

‘Stay calm. Stay under cover.’

Mark looked at David, who was pressed up hard against the wall. His eyes were closed as he whimpered a prayer.

‘You want to make a break for it?’ Mark asked Liz.

‘Not in the pick-up,’ she said. ‘They’ll see that.’

‘All right.’ He brought the hand-held array up. ‘Carys?’

Liz’s hand closed tight around his upper arm. ‘I don’t goddamn believe it.’

Mark twisted round, following Liz’s disbelieving stare. ‘What in God’s name . . .?’

Mellanie was walking down the street past the Ables Motors garage, heading towards the waterfront. She kept to the centre of the road, avoiding the worst of the debris. Her hair and shoulders were damp from the earlier rain, otherwise she was as perfectly groomed as usual. Dense-packed silver OCtattoos flickered over her face and hands, as if they were her true skin emerging into the light.

‘Get down!’ Mark screamed at her.

She turned her head and gave him a small sympathetic smile. A near-subliminal golden fractal pattern spiralled out around her eyes. ‘Stay there,’ she told him calmly. ‘This isn’t something you can handle.’

‘Mellanie!’

She’d gone another five paces when four aliens burst out of Kate’s Knitwear ten metres ahead of her, smashing straight through the remaining aluminium wall panels. Their arms curved round to line up their weapons on her. The motion slowed then stopped. All four of them stood perfectly still in the middle of the road.

Mark realized that all the flyers in the air were gradually lowering themselves to the ground. Out over Trine’ba, the flyers rushing to Randtown dipped gently, angling down to strike the water hard. Big plumes of spray cascaded upwards, falling away to reveal the craft bobbing low on the surface.

‘Mellanie?’ Mark croaked. ‘Are you doing this?’

‘With a little help, yes.’

He clambered slowly to his feet, trying to stop the tremble in his legs. Liz stood beside him, gazing warily at the young girl. David poked his head above the wall. ‘Jesus,’ he spat.

‘Take their weapons,’ Mellanie said. Her face was almost completely silver now, with only a few slivers of skin remaining around her cheeks and brow.

‘You’re joking,’ Mark said.

The four aliens dropped their weapons onto the road.

‘You’re not joking.’

‘You should be able to shoot through their force fields with those,’ Mellanie said. ‘You’ll probably need to when they come after you again. This standoff won’t last for ever. But I’ll keep them here as long as I can.’ She took a deep breath, closing her chrome eyelids. ‘Leave now.’

Mark glanced down, her voice had come out of the hand-held array as well.

‘Everybody, get in your vehicles and fall back,’ she ordered. ‘Join the convoy.’

‘What’s happening?’ Simon’s voice asked.

Mark brought the array up to his mouth. ‘Just do it, Simon. She’s stopped them.’

‘Stopped them how?’

‘Mark’s right,’ someone else said. ‘I can see a whole bunch of them. They’re just standing there.’

‘Go,’ Mellanie said. ‘You haven’t got long. Go!’

Mark looked at the weapons lying on the tarmac as if it was some kind of school dare. The aliens still hadn’t moved.

‘Come on,’ Liz said. She darted forwards.

Mark hurried after her. The weapons were bulky, too heavy to carry easily, let alone aim. He pulled up a couple, giving the tall silent immobile aliens a cautious look as he scrabbled round at their feet, as if this might be the act which finally broke the spell, goading them into motion and retaliation. David came up beside him, and picked up one of the chunky cylinders.

‘Let’s get out of here for Christ’s sake,’ Liz said.

Mark managed to hold on to a third weapon. He scooted the hell away from the bizarre tableau.

‘What now?’ Liz asked Mellanie.

‘You go.’

‘What about you? Will you be all right?’

‘Yes.’ She gave Mark one of her menacingly erotic smiles. ‘Quits?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Quits.’

‘Thank you,’ Liz said.

The three of them raced for the pick-up. They slung the purloined alien weapons in the back, and Mark slammed the accelerator to the floor. He snatched one last glimpse of Mellanie in the rear-view mirror. The silhouette of a small human girl standing defiantly in front of four big armoured aliens, waiting, watching, as silent as the army she had stilled.

*

Mellanie’s inserts were feeding her a fresh image of the world; no longer data but an extension of her ordinary senses. She could actually see the electromagnetic emissions flooding out of the aliens as they stormed ashore. Each one blazing bright in this black spectrum. Long, complex, and slow signals slipped between them, a conduit of tight-packed analogue sine waves dancing and crackling around each other. They formed net-works, brief, transient patterns that were forever rearranging themselves, connecting individual aliens, then switching back and forth between the flyers who relayed them in new combinations to the big conical ships floating on the Trine’ba. Huge columns of information streamed out of both ships, twisting up through the atmosphere to vanish inside the trans-dimensional vortex of the wormholes above.

It made a striking contrast to the abridged electronic network of Randtown, with its slender lines of carefully packaged binary pulses zipping purposefully around her. Where the human systems were neat and efficient, these alien outpourings were crude. Yet, she acknowledged, they possessed a certain integral elegance. As it was with all organic forms.

Mellanie concentrated on the rush of strange waveforms radiating out of a Prime flyer as it manoeuvred above the promenade, ready to land. A new batch of woken inserts buzzed with electric vibrancy inside her flesh. She knew of the SI’s presence inside them, analysing what she discovered for it, teasing apart the oscillating signals to discover their meaning. As the flyer’s emissions coursed through the inserts she heard a harsh unintelligible voice at the back of her mind, it bloomed to a whispered chorus. Then there were the images, leaking out of the signals like some long-forgotten dream. A confused multiple viewpoint of motiles emerging from a congregation lake, millions of them pressed together, slipping and sliding as they waded ashore. Next to them was the towering mountain clad in rooms and chambers where it was centred, all of life in the star system. A mountain where long ago light used to shine in the morning. Now the sky was permanently dark beneath the heavy clouds, an everlasting night split only by the incessant flash of lightning bolts, revealing the filthy rain and sleet which fell across the protective force fields. A black sky also seen from the asteroids orbiting far above, shielding the whole planet, its turbulence illuminated to insipid grey by sunlight and blazing strands of fusion flame. Life still thrived beneath the veil, woven inseparably to groupings of itself as it seethed and survived everywhere, on small cold planets, moons encircling gas-giants, and far asteroid settlements. A life that now extended to other stars and their planets. A life that had flown through the wormholes to reach Elan where it was spreading out over the lake to touch the land.

The life whispered amid itself, directing its soldier motiles to move forward into the flimsy box-buildings. It searched for humans and their machinery. Finding none of either. Though there was movement, the tell-tale infrared signatures which the soldier motiles were skilfully working their way towards. At the back of the urban area, long vehicles raced away. Flyers angled round to investigate.

One of the soldier motiles was shot at. It retaliated immediately, firing back, destroying the zone where the shot had come from. Flyers swooped eagerly, raking the buildings with coherent beams of gamma radiation.

‘They’re going to destroy everything,’ Mellanie said.

‘It,’ the SI corrected. ‘It is singular. An interesting arrangement. Life that has achieved unity, not just with itself but with its machinery.’

‘I don’t care what it is, it’s still going to kill people.’

‘We know.’

Programs and power flooded through Mellanie’s inserts, activating yet more functions. She had little to do with it other than adding her wishes to the conclusion. Fabulously complex OCtattoos crawled over her skin, merging into a single circuit. Signals streamed out from her, overlaying those which fused the motiles together. Interference patterns jostled and ruptured the smooth consistency of the soldier herd’s thoughts. Riding down the disruption were new instructions.

Mellanie left her shelter and walked slowly towards the Trine’ba so she could observe properly. Poor Mark Vernon tried to warn her, so she gave him and his friends some of the Prime weapons and made sure he left, along with all Rand-town’s valiant, futile defenders.

‘It has realized something is wrong,’ the SI said. ‘Can you sense it?’

The signals spilling down from the wormholes were changing. Instead of orders, queries were trying to insinuate themselves into the soldier motiles. The Prime wanted to know what malaise was contaminating its units.

The SI maintained its interference pattern among the motile soldiers in Randtown, formulating a single reply which it sent out through Mellanie’s inserts. ‘We are stopping you,’ it told MorningLightMountain.

Mellanie was aware of the shock ripple spreading through the alien’s planet-wide thought routines hundreds of light-years away. ‘Who are you?’ it asked.

‘We are the SI, an ally of the humans.’

‘The Bose memories know of you. You are the human immotile. The endpoint of their individuality. They created you because they knew they were not perfect without you.’

Bose memories, Mellanie thought. Oh shit, that’s not good. Though maybe in a way it is, it will give my new Dudley some closure.

‘Your reading of the Bose memories is inaccurate,’ the SI said. ‘Though we will not argue with you on definitions. We are contacting you to ask you to stop your attacks on the humans. They are pointless. You do not need these planets.’

‘Neither do the humans.’

‘Nonetheless they are living on them. You are killing them. That must stop.’

‘Why?’

‘It is wrong. And you know it.’

‘Life must survive. I am alive. I must not die.’

‘You are not under threat. If you continue this aggression you will become threatened.’

‘By existing, other life threatens me. Only when I become total will I secure my immortality.’

‘Define: total.’

‘One life, everywhere.’

‘That will not happen, ever.’

‘You threaten me. You will be destroyed.’

‘We state facts. It will not be possible for you to destroy us. Nor will you be able to destroy many other civilizations which exist within this galaxy. You must learn how to co-exist with us.’

‘That is a contradiction in terms. There is only one universe, it can only contain one life. It is me.’

‘This is not a contradiction. You are simply inexperienced with such a concept. We assure you it is possible.’

‘You are betraying yourself by believing this. Life grows, it expands. This is inevitable. It is what I am.’

‘True life evolves. You can change.’

‘No.’

‘You must change.’

‘I will not. I will grow. I will learn. I will surpass you. I will destroy you, both of you.’

Mellanie was aware of a change in the nature of the signals coming though the wormholes to fall upon the planet. MorningLightMountain was giving the soldier motiles on the landing ships distinct orders, then disengaging them from its communication web. Whilst they didn’t have a great deal of independent capability, a soldier motile could certainly follow simple target instructions, and use its own combat systems without direct real-time supervision.

Sixteen flyers launched from the two landing ships. They accelerated forward at five gees. Targeting sensors swept across Randtown, bright as searchlights to Mellanie’s broadened perception.

‘Grandpa!’ she yelled.

A circular wormhole opened behind her, a tiny distortion point hovering a metre above the road that produced a curious twisted magnification effect in the air. It swiftly expanded out to a neutral-grey circle two metres in diameter. Mellanie jumped through.

Two seconds later, sixteen atom lasers intersected the empty air where she’d been standing.

Mellanie picked herself off the grass, blinking against the warm light even as she winced at the pain in her knee from a bad landing. Her skin was cooling, its platinum lustre slowly reverting to the healthy tan she maintained thanks to her expensive Augusta salon. In sympathy, her body’s shock was also receding, her racing heart slowing, the shakes calming. So much for the inserts giving her a sensation of invincibility.

Behind her, the wormhole gateway was built into a smooth rock cliff. Some kind of triangular canvas awning was stretched overhead. In front of her . . . Mellanie forgot all about bruised knees, and nearly fell over. Her balance was horribly wrong, and the land curved up over her head. Giddiness that was close to seasickness hit her hard.

‘Where the hell am I?’ she squawked.

‘Don’t be alarmed,’ the SI said. ‘This is the only currently unused wormhole generator in the Commonwealth that could reach you.’

‘Uh—’ Someone had really gone to town on the vast cylinder’s landscape. It was all giant mountains with waterfalls foaming down long tracts of rock. Big lakes and rivers filled the valley floors. The sunlight emerged from a single spindle running down the axis. ‘This isn’t the High Angel,’ she said.

‘Of course not.’

‘But it’s got artificial gravity. We can’t do that. Is it an alien space station?’

‘It is a human-built structure, belonging to someone of considerable wealth. The gravity effect comes from simple rotation, like the Second Chance life-support wheel.’

‘Oh, right, yeah. I didn’t do science at school.’

‘You didn’t do school, baby Mel.’

‘Thanks, good timing on the reminder, there, Grandpa. So who lives here?’

‘The owner guards his privacy. But given the circumstances I don’t expect he will protest your visit. I have now reprogrammed the wormhole to take you to Augusta. Please step through.’

Mellanie was still staring round the interior. ‘It’s fantastic. And it’s got a private wormhole?’ She smiled happily. ‘Ozzie.’

‘You will respect his privacy.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ She stopped. The adrenaline rush which had supported her through the confrontation in Randtown was beginning to wear off. When she held a hand up there was no sign of any OCtattoo. ‘What about the convoy?’

‘They have all reached the Highmarsh Valley.’

‘But – the navy won’t evacuate them for days. That alien monster will kill every one of them.’

‘It will attempt that, yes.’

‘Open the wormhole back into the Highmarsh. We’ve got to get them out of there.’

‘That is an impractical suggestion. This wormhole is small. The Randtown refugees would have to step through one at a time. The process would take hours, and provide MorningLightMountain with a perfect targeting opportunity.’

‘Open it!’

*

Wilson’s tactical display showed him the electronic warfare aerobots launching from Treloar. Five of them flew out in a pincer movement through the smog to surround the Prime ground troops spreading out from Scraptoft. The alien positions were overlaid by webs of orange and jade as their strange communications flashed between them. Their intermittent, seemingly random, bursts reminded Wilson of synaptic discharges between individual neurones.

Stealthed sensors showed him images of the armoured Primes slipping through what was left of Scraptoft’s buildings. The way they moved told Wilson they had considerable practice with urban warfare. They’d already killed several humans who’d remained in the little costal town; using weapons that were powerful enough to take out half a building with one shot. Media reports from other assaulted worlds had shown similar atrocities. The Primes weren’t interested in taking prisoners.

Over fifteen thousand armoured aliens had poured out of the big ships to help secure Scraptoft. They were busy establishing a fortified perimeter with a ten-kilometre radius around the town. Several force field generators had been delivered by cargo flyers, along with weapons capable of shooting down any aerobot that ventured too close. At least that meant the protective formation of eight ships had finally splashed down; though the hot murky smog they’d created was taking a long time to disperse.

The four ships that had been the first to splash down had already launched again, flying back to the wormholes above the planet. Wilson didn’t like to think what kind of cargo they’d be bringing with them when they returned.

‘EW aerobots going active,’ Anna said.

The slim craft popped up over the horizon, and began jamming the sensors of the perimeter weapons. Nothing shot at them. They flew closer, and began breaking into the multifarious Prime broadcasts.

‘Son of a bitch,’ Wilson said. It was the first time he’d smiled all day. The stealth sensors showed him armoured Primes slowing down and moving about erratically; clockwork soldiers that were winding down.

‘Get the combat aerobots back in there,’ Wilson told Rafael. ‘Hit the bastards.’

The EW aerobots widened their assault, targeting the communication links between the flyers and the landing ships out at sea. It was the same effect, with flyers soaring onwards, or tumbling lazily out of the air.

A thousand kilometres above Anshun, eight Prime ships altered their descent trajectory so that they would overfly Scraptoft. The change flashed up in the tactical display.

‘See if we can EW them as well,’ Wilson said. ‘How many dedicated EW systems have we got?’

‘I can only find another seventy-three listed in the governmental register,’ Anna said.

‘I want every one of them. Get them deployed.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘If we might make a suggestion,’ the SI said. ‘It may be possible to use the surviving elements of planetary cyberspheres to produce a similar effect. The Prime signals seem remarkably susceptible to interference. Even non-military systems should be sufficient to create a reasonable degree of disturbance.’

‘Will you do that for us?’

‘Of course.’

‘Admiral,’ Anna called. ‘The starships have arrived.’

*

Anshun’s First Speaker, Gilda Princess Marden, and her cabinet were in the civil emergency centre twenty metres beneath the Regency Palace, trying to coordinate the capital’s evacuation with the navy’s requirements to deploy troops and aerobots. Consequently they had no view of the sky. Not that it would have mattered, the dreadful corrupted vapour was still swirling round the city’s force field, censoring any sight of the lights percolating through space above the planet. But other cities on Anshun were clear of obstruction, as were the millions of people caught outside the urban force fields and still struggling to reach them. Even on the sunward side of the planet, they could see the fusion contrails of the Prime ships slicing across space as they rose and fell from the wormholes. Now new lights appeared, the bright turquoise of Cherenkov radiation flaring down as if small stars had suddenly ignited in orbit. There were five of them, spaced equidistantly three thousand kilometres above the planet’s equator. The warships Dauntless, Defiant and Desperado slipped out into real space; along with the scoutships Conway and Galibi.

After that, it became impossible to look directly into the sky. Fusion drives scratched huge lines of dazzling fire across the constellations as they accelerated ships and missiles at high gees. Nuclear explosions blossomed silently, swelling to merge into a nebula brighter than sunlight that braceleted the entire world. Occasionally, energy beams would penetrate the atmosphere, becoming intense sparkling pillars of violet light tens of kilometres high, lasting for a second or more. Where they touched the ground, lethal gouts of molten rock would spew up, adding to the wildfire which raced outward from the touchpoint. Huge radiation bursts inflamed the ionosphere, sending borealis storms spinning around the globe.

The battle lasted for over an hour, then the nebula faded away, its ions gusting out towards interplanetary space, cooling and decaying as they dispersed. In its wake, more Prime ships ventured out of the wormholes, again filling low-orbit space with their slender vivid exhausts. For hours, vast shoals of flaming meteorites fell to earth, trailing long ribbons of black smoke behind them.

Anyone still out in the open kept one fearful eye on the sky above, dodging the debris as they redoubled their efforts to reach sanctuary.

*

The Ables pick-up truck was bouncing wildly as Mark gunned it along the stone chip road that ran the length of the Highmarsh Valley. He was leading the little band of vehicles that were carrying the surviving members of Simon Rand’s rearguard. A couple of kilometres up ahead, the bus convoy was racing along. He couldn’t see the MG, though he knew it was up there, well in front of the buses. They had a clear communication link with Carys, the network along the High-marsh had rebuilt itself to a good thirty per cent of its original capacity.

‘We’re about at the junction,’ Carys told them. Her voice coming from the hand-held array was thin and strained. ‘Barry says it’s the road that takes us to the Ulon.’

‘What do they do?’ Mark asked Liz. ‘Do they go home?’

‘Christ knows.’ She tapped one of the icons on the array. ‘Simon, have you actually got any idea where we should be going?’

‘I believe the Turquino Valley should be our first choice,’ Simon said. ‘It is relatively narrow, with high walls, which will make it difficult for the aliens to fly in there.’

‘But it’s a dead end,’ Yuri Conant protested.

‘There’s a track out to the Sonchin,’ Lydia Dunbavand said.

‘A foot track,’ Mark said. ‘For mountain goats. Not even a 4x4 could use it.’

‘Nonetheless, that is where we should proceed,’ Simon said. ‘We just have to hang on until the navy opens a wormhole to evacuate us.’

Liz thumped the dashboard. ‘Eight hundred and goddamn seventy-sixth place on the list,’ she groaned. ‘The only thing left of us by then will be a few lumps of charcoal.’

The array flashed up a general call icon. ‘I’ve got a worm-hole open inside the Turquino Valley,’ Mellanie’s voice said. ‘It’s not a large one, I’m afraid, so it will take a long time to get everyone through. If we’re lucky we can pull it off before the Primes discover what’s happening. Simon?’

‘Heaven bless you, Mellanie,’ Simon said. ‘All right, people, you heard; convoy to proceed to the Turquino.’

‘We left Mellanie behind us,’ Mark said flatly. They’d barely reached Blackwater Crag when a huge, powerful explosion had flattened almost a third of the town. It appeared to be centred on the Ables Motors garage where they’d left Mellanie. When it happened he’d told himself that she would have found a way out, not that he had a clue how she’d do it. Now, rather than relief, he was getting more than a little apprehensive about Mellanie Rescorai and her abilities.

‘She said she was getting help,’ Liz said.

‘Who the hell gives help on this scale?’

‘It’s either someone like Sheldon, or possibly the SI itself. I can’t think of any other way she could pull this off.’

‘God almighty, why her?’

‘Dunno, baby,’ Liz said. ‘God has a sense of humour after all? But I’m glad she’s on our side.’

‘Goddamn.’ He clenched the steering wheel, staring sulkily through the cracked, grubby windscreen. A long line of pick-up trucks, 4x4s, and buses were turning off the Highmarsh road just before the main junction, taking an even smaller track that threaded along the line of tall dark-jade liipoplars which marked the edge of the Calsor homestead.

‘Carys?’ Liz asked.

‘On the road to nowhere. I hope your little girlfriend knows what she’s doing.’

‘Me too.’

The Turquino Valley was narrow even by the standards of the Highmarsh’s northern ramparts. A near-symmetrical v-shape that began two hundred metres above the floor of the Highmarsh. Its walls had boltgrass scrabbling a little way up the lower slopes, but after fifty metres or so the vegetation and stony soil gave way to naked rock. Rivulets oozed down from the jagged heights, feeding into a fast-flowing stream which foamed along the bottom to spill out into the Highmarsh.

By the time the track reached the Turquino’s mouth, it was little more than a line of beaten-down boltgrass. Only the most foolhardy sheep and goats strayed into this valley.

Yuri Conant was leading the convoy in his 4x4. It was already at a steep angle when it reached the ice-cold stream gushing out of the Turquino. Through the windscreen he could see the mountains rising imposingly above him, guarding the entrance. His vehicle was going to have trouble getting any further. The buses certainly weren’t going to get past the stream. He went over the water and braked to a halt.

When he got out, he knew he’d never forget the sight of the convoy jostling its way up the slope. Broad sunbeams were prising their way through the battered clouds above to play over the filthy battered vehicles. Pick-ups were packed full. All the buses had their doors open to draw some air inside now the conditioners had failed; people were standing down the aisles. The sound of frightened children and injured adults arrived long before the vehicles reached him. Most prominent of all was Carys’s beautiful metallic-grey sports car, whose fat wheels had lowered themselves beneath the chassis on tele-scoping suspension struts, bounding along over the rough terrain with the ease of any 4x4.

It drove through the stream without any difficulty and pulled up beside him. The side window came down.

‘Any sign of the wormhole?’ Carys asked. Barry and Sandy were squashed into the passenger seat beside her, with Panda lying along the back.

‘Not from here, no.’

‘Okay, I’ll keep going as far as I can.’

He waved languidly as she drove off down the valley, keeping parallel to the stream. Several 4x4s followed her; then the first bus arrived and he joined in helping with the wounded.

By the time Mark drew up at the improvised parking lot, the scene had become a replay of the bus station. A lot of people were clambering over the boltgrass slope to get into the valley, hauling kids along. Dozens more were milling round the four buses that were carrying the injured, manhandling stretchers out of the doors.

‘Found it,’ Carys exclaimed jubilantly from the array. ‘We’re five hundred metres in from the start of the valley. Mellanie’s here waiting, and she wasn’t kidding, I’ve never seen a wormhole this small before.’

‘Get them through!’ Mark blurted. He felt Liz’s hand in his, gripping tight.

‘Out of the car,’ Carys said. ‘Five metres. Mellanie’s saying hello. Yeah, right, hi. Okay, Barry, go on dear. That’s it. Hold my hand, Sandy. Mark, we’re safe—’

He let out a sob. Beside him, Liz was smiling despite her moist eyes. They looked at each other for a long moment. ‘Guess we’d better go and lend a hand,’ she said.

Simon was gathering his little band of devotees to him along the side of the gushing stream. He held up a hand as Mark, Liz, and David went past. ‘Those of us with weapons should dig in here at the valley entrance and provide some cover for our friends and families. It will be some time before everyone is through, and the aliens will probably come after us.’

Mark gave Liz a despairing look. ‘I think he’s talking about us again,’ he said under his breath.

‘Yeah. Well at least we have some heavy-duty weapons, now.’ Liz held up one of the big cylinders she’d taken from the Prime.

‘We don’t know what they are, or how they work.’

She gave him a wolfish grin. ‘Lucky we’ve got the best technical man in Randtown with us then, huh, baby?’

*

It was silent in the tactical display for several minutes after the Desperado shot back into hyperdrive and withdrew from the battle above Anshun. Wilson moved his hands across icons, pulling down sensor displays. Not that Anshun had many sensors left in working order, but the aerobots provided intermittent sweeps of space directly above the tempestuous ionosphere. Forty-eight wormholes held their position in an ephemeral necklace two thousand kilometres above the equator. As he watched, several types of Prime ships began to fly out of them, accelerating through the hellishly radioactive cloud of cosmic dust and debris that churned around the planet.

‘They’re still there,’ Elaine Doi said in an appalled murmur. ‘We didn’t close one of them. Not one!’

‘You have to get through to the generators,’ Dimitri Leopoldovich said. ‘Simply hitting them with crude energy assaults from this side is completely ineffectual, they are manifestations of ordered energy themselves.’

‘Thank you, Academician,’ Rafael said. ‘We just watched four of our ships die trying to defend us, so unless you have something constructive to add, shut the fuck up.’

‘Fifty-two alien ships either destroyed or disabled,’ Anna said. ‘Our missiles outperform theirs every time. But they do have weight of numbers. That’s their advantage every time.’

‘What are we going to do?’ the President asked.

Wilson was disgusted with how whiny she sounded.

‘Our aerobots managed to strike every landing site on Anshun while the starships were engaged above the planet,’ Rafael said. ‘We wiped out ninety per cent of them. They’ll have to start the occupation again.’

‘Which I have no doubt they have the resources for,’ the President said. ‘Weight of numbers, again.’

‘Probably, but in the meantime we can complete the evacuation.’

‘We now have eight extra wormholes open inside city force fields,’ Nigel Sheldon said. ‘Another three hours should see Anshun evacuated.’

‘And the other planets?’ Doi asked coolly. She was rallying well after the loss of the starships.

‘Our electronic warfare strategy is proving effective,’ the SI said. ‘It is certainly slowing down the rate of advance once the aliens reach the planetary surface. They are having to physically eliminate cybersphere nodes one at a time as they expand outward. However, the latest landings give cause for concern.’

‘In what way?’ Wilson asked.

‘We have been using stealthed sensors to scrutinize the cargo they are currently unloading on several worlds. It appears to be gateway machinery, which will allow them to anchor their wormholes on the planet surface.’

‘If they deliver direct to the planet, we’ll never be able to stop their incursion,’ Nigel said.

‘Realistically, we’re never going to anyway,’ Wilson said. ‘Not to a degree that we take them back for ourselves. Look at the state of the environment on the assaulted worlds.’

‘You’re writing them off?’ Doi asked.

‘Basically, yes,’ Wilson said.

‘They’ll crucify us,’ she said. ‘The Senate will fling every one of us out of office, and probably into jail.’

Wilson’s virtual vision printed: Don’t, she’s not worth it; the text’s origin code identified Anna as the sender. ‘We didn’t know it was going to be this bad,’ he said mildly.

‘Yes we did,’ Dimitri said.

Wilson turned to the translucent planet representations. The cyberspheres of each of them were illustrated by livid golden threads. There were black areas surrounding each of the Prime landing zones, a darkness that was slowly eating further and further into the gold. ‘We’ve nothing else left to hit them with,’ Wilson said. ‘All we can do is fall back and regroup.’ He took the first of a series of deep breaths; but not even the rush of oxygen could hold back the black weariness. There hadn’t been a war in human history where so much had been lost in so little time. And I’m the one in charge. Dimitri is right, we did know, we just didn’t want to admit it.

*

Captain Jean Douvoir heard the fans whirring efficiently behind the grilles as they sucked acrid smoke from the Desperado’s bridge. The warship had been lucky; that last directed-energy burst had almost penetrated the hull field. As it was there had been some localized breaches which had played hell with the power circuitry. The stabilizers had done their best, but not even superconductors could handle surges induced by megaton nuclear blasts. With their defences dangerously weakened, he’d slammed the Desperado into hyperspace to escape the Prime projectiles hurtling towards them.

‘Merde,’ he grunted as they emerged outside the Anshun system’s cometary halo. His virtual vision showed him the ship’s electronic systems rebuilding themselves. There was very little redundancy left now. They’d never survive another sustained attack. And that’s what would happen if they went back. There was no end to the Prime ships and projectiles.

The four communication icons to the other starships had red ‘invalid’ signs flashing over them.

‘What’s the status back there?’ he asked Don Lantra, who was operating the sensor suite.

Don gave him a weary look. ‘Just lost track of the Dauntless. That’s all of them, boss.’

Jean wanted to punch his fist into the console, a useless and difficult gesture in freefall. He knew most of the crews. Back on the High Angel they’d hung out together, one big fraternity living in each other’s lives. Now the only way he’d see them again would be after their re-life procedures. Not even that softened the blow. It would take years. Assuming the Commonwealth lasted that long.

His virtual vision flashed up a communication icon from Admiral Kime. ‘What’s your status, Jean?’ Wilson asked.

‘Getting things stable out here. We can take another pass at them soon.’

‘No. Get back to High Angel.’

‘We’ve still got seven missiles left.’

‘Jean another fifty ships have come through already. You did a superb job, you all did, but the evacuation’s almost complete.’

‘You’re abandoning Anshun?’

‘We have to. We’re evacuating all the assaulted worlds.’

‘No. All of them? But we have to do something. They cannot be allowed a victory. Today it is twenty-three worlds, if we let them get away with that it will be a hundred tomorrow. We have to fight back.’

‘We have been fighting, Jean, we’ve had our victories. You and the other starships bought Anshun valuable time. But you’re the only warship left, so fly back to base and we’ll refit you to fight another day.’

‘Victories? I don’t think so. Dimitri was right, we had to get through the wormholes and block them from the other side.’

‘You know we couldn’t do that; they’re too heavily defended. We’ll find the star they’re using as a staging post, Jean. We’ll hit them there. You’ll be commanding the whole task force.’

‘And how long will it take to build that many ships, Admiral?’

‘As long as it takes. Now head back to base.’

‘Yes sir.’

He ordered the plyplastic straps on his acceleration couch to ease off, and clenched his stomach muscles, forcing himself up into a sitting position. The rest of the bridge crew were all looking at him. ‘I am not prepared to accept defeat today,’ he told them. ‘My secure memory store was updated before we left High Angel, and I will join our comrades in re-life. I am flying this ship back to Anshun, where it will live up to its name. If anyone wishes to leave now, then please use the escape pods, the navy will pick you up.’

All he saw were smiles and a few grim expressions. Nobody took up his offer to leave.

‘Very well, gentlemen and ladies, it has been my pleasure and honour to serve with you. God willing we will serve together again after re-life. For now, we must reprogram the hyperdrive. There are a great many safety limiters to be removed.’

*

The clouds were finally lifting as the day ended, allowing a rosy twilight to infiltrate the Highmarsh. From his position, hunched down behind a clump of boulders thirty metres up the side of the Turquino Valley, Mark Vernon watched the land in front of him soak up the light, acquiring a faint ginger shading. He couldn’t quite see down the Ulon Valley from here, for which he was grateful. Actually being able to see his home as they waited to leave would have been unbearable.

‘Not long now, baby,’ Liz said.

He smiled over at her, amazed as always how she always knew his mood. She was taking a break, sitting with her back to the boulders, a thick fleece pulled round her shoulders against the chill air which the Dau’sings blew along the Turquino.

‘Guess not.’ He could see the end of the queue below him, barely a thousand people left, shuffling along the side of the little stream with its icy water. Even the wormhole was visible from this vantage point, a small dark-grey circle that was starting to be absorbed by the deep shadows that cloaked the base of the valley. The MG was parked to one side of it, the first of several vehicles that had been abandoned along the meagre track. It wasn’t far away. Time and again in his mind, Mark had gone over how long it would take him to run down the rugged slope to get there. Not that running would be much use. Everyone else had to get through first. Even now, with only able-bodied adults left, they still seemed to be taking their own sweet time. Didn’t they realize the urgency?

‘They’ve reached the Highmarsh,’ Mellanie said.

Mark gave the hand-held array a vexed glance. How the hell does she know that? Then the display on the array’s screen showed him a node at the far end of the Highmarsh go off line. Oh.

Liz picked up her oversize alien weapon and moved to crouch beside Mark. ‘Twenty minutes,’ she said, giving the line of people a quick glance. ‘That’s all. Maybe less.’

‘Maybe.’ He thought the queue was starting to speed up – a little. The screen on the hand-held array showed another two nodes had dropped out along the Highmarsh. There was a faint sound that could have been an explosion.

‘Are we all ready?’ Simon asked. He was on the opposite side of the valley to Mark, with another of the big alien weapons. It hadn’t taken Mark long to rig the triggers so they could be used by human hands. They had a strange double button arrangement, which had to be pressed in a sequence that was difficult for fingers. One of them shot explosive micro-missiles, while the remaining three were very powerful beam weapons.

‘Guess so,’ Mark muttered sulkily.

Liz brought the hand-held array up to her mouth. ‘Standing by.’

‘Remember, as soon as you’ve fired the weapons, fall back.’

She rolled her eyes at Mark, grinning. ‘Yeah, we’ll remember that.’

Mark leaned forward and kissed her.

‘I don’t think we’ve got time,’ she said pertly.

‘Just in case,’ he said, almost sheepishly. ‘I want you to know in case anything happens, I do love you.’

‘Oh, baby.’ She kissed him. ‘When we get through that wormhole, your pants are coming straight off, mister.’

He grinned. Another node on the Highmarsh had vanished. By his reckoning that was the one near the Marly homestead. Maybe a kilometre from the entrance to the Turquino. ‘Are we going to come back here? To live, I mean?’

‘I don’t know, baby. Simon thinks we will.’

‘Do you want to, if we can?’

‘Of course I do. I’ve had the best time of my lives here. We’re going to go on living like this.’

A further three nodes went down.

‘Here they are,’ Mark grunted.

*

After two hours spent modifying various systems, the Desperado slipped back into hyperspace. At top speed they were two minutes away from Anshun. Jean Douvoir was totally absorbed by the hysradar display, which showed him the wormholes encircling the planet as diamond-bright specks. He picked one, and aligned the warship directly on it.

When they were thirty seconds’ flight time away from the wormhole, he ordered the ship’s RI to formulate their break-out point. Normally, the emergence from hyperspace was safeguarded by the RI’s programming, restricting the opening’s relative velocity. If they were coming out into a planetary orbit, the opening’s trajectory would match the local escape velocity, ensuring a safe entrance to real space. With the limiters removed, Jean gave the opening a velocity of point two light speed.

Cherenkov radiation flooded out of the fracture in space-time five hundred kilometres from the Prime wormhole. The Desperado flashed out from the centre of the violet radiance, travelling at one fifth the speed of light as it struck the force field which capped the wormhole. Detonation was instantaneous, converting a high percentage of its mass directly into energy in the form of ultra-hard radiation which punctured the force field as if it was nothing more than a bubble of brittle antique glass. The Prime wormhole was left open to the full power of the new and temporary sun that had risen above Anshun.

*

One of the cylindrical alien flyers shot across the end of the Turquino Valley. Mark tried to chase it with the muzzle of his weapon, but it zipped behind the steep slope on the other side before he was anywhere near. A long rumble of roiling air reverberated in from the Highmarsh.

Two more flyers appeared, travelling a lot slower than the first. Mark managed to get one centred in his sights, and pressed the trigger. The flyer’s force field burned in hazy turquoise light, with small slivers of static snapping repeatedly into the ground. Liz fired her beam gun, intensifying the corona. Over on the other side of the valley, Simon fired the projectile weapon. A plume of blue fire squirted horizontally from the endangered force field, sending glowing fireballs dripping around the shaking craft. It banked abruptly and swept away out of the line of sight. Its partner raced away.

‘Move!’ Mark shouted.

He was racing away from the boulders, crouched low, the weapon heavy in his hands. Fifty metres ahead, and slightly downslope, was another clump of boulders. With his feet thudding into the spongy boltgrass, his heart hammering, and Liz whooping manically beside him, he felt himself smile stupidly. It was almost as if he was enjoying himself.

They were five metres from cover when a huge blast demolished the boulders they’d been using. He flung himself flat, his mood flipping instantly to naked fear. ‘Are you all right?’ he yelled as the flyer’s roaring wake shook the air.

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 immotile 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.