Soćko’s icon splashed into his display. ‘You’ve rattled them,’ he said. ‘The Salvation onemind is deeply shocked by the attack. They didn’t expect us to use nukes on Earth. It’s redeploying Deliverance ships to protect the transports.’
‘But not recalling them?’ Johnston asked.
‘No. Not yet.’
‘Very well, let’s get it to take us more seriously. Move to phase two.’
Eight hundred portals opened above Earth, completely encircling the globe. Cruisers poured through. The majority started to head down to the planet, while others formed up into fifty-strong attack formations and accelerated along interception courses towards incoming Deliverance ships. Space was drenched with slender fusion plumes, fashioning a crosshatch of incandescent light above the upper atmosphere, caging the whole planet.
Eight thousand miles above the Indian Ocean, a Deliverance ship performed an eleven-gee parabolic manoeuvre to align itself on one of the attack formations. Incredibly powerful energy beams stabbed out from it, slicing straight through the cruisers’ defence shields, killing the ships in a blaze of energized vapour. The formation’s survivors responded with a synchronized barrage of Calmissiles. They were small – two metres in diameter – but they used the same principle as human sublight starships, making the teardrop-shaped casing a single portal. Holes accelerating through space at twenty-five gees.
The Deliverance ships only knew they were there because of their exhaust plume. They shot energy beams at them; they fired kinetic harpoons; they detonated thirty-five-megaton warheads, whose plasma spheres saturated local space with high-energy particles. None of them had the slightest effect. Every assault simply passed through the hole, ejecting from the portal’s inert twin thousands of kilometres away.
The first Deliverance ship was struck by seventeen Calmissiles within a one and a half second period. Travelling at over seventy kilometres a second, each of them cored out a perfect tunnel through the ship, slicing through whatever solid structure they encountered. Milliseconds later, each of those gaps was flooded with their fusion plasma exhaust. The Deliverance ship started to disintegrate, only to have the ruptured fragments instantly turn into a sleet of raw atoms.
‘Okay,’ Soćko said. ‘That frightened the onemind.’
‘Start the clearance,’ Johnston ordered. ‘Every Olyix ship below geostationary orbit.’ He focused on the display section locked on northern Utah. ‘Loi, stand by.’
Knockdown Mission
S-Day, 11th December 2206
There were three of them in the transit chamber when its blast doors rumbled shut and locked with a loud series of clunks. In front of Loi, the rims of seven expansion portals glowed a vivid turquoise, surrounding a centre of insubstantial grey, as if they were being lit from behind by weak moonlight.
His suit closed around him in readiness. It was a brute of a thing, adding more than half a metre to his height. Beside him, in hir own suit, Eldlund stood three metres tall. Lim Tianyu was a mere two metres sixty centimetres.
For a brief moment, as the light vanished, Loi was gripped by a pang of claustrophobia. The helmet was solid, like the rest of the suit, its thick carapace the same dull pewter sheen as medieval suits of armour. Loi knew those old knights used to ride on horses specially bred to carry the enormous weight – something else he shared with those long-ago nobles. Right now, he weighed in at more than half a tonne. Unlike the armour that modern mercenaries and corporate security wore on their combat missions, very little of that weight was weaponry. This was all about protection. His armour’s primary purpose was to defend the wearer from radiation. Not even a tactical nuke’s gamma pulse could get through it. Nearly a third of the mass was artificial muscle, without which he wouldn’t even be able to stand, let alone move. The weight and toughness made it apposite for enduring Earth’s wrecked climate. No, this suit didn’t have knights of old in its heritage; its grandparents were more likely to be army tanks.
His tarsus lens splashed the armour’s external sensor image, and his breathing became calmer. Tactical displays showed him the titanic battle going on in space above Salt Lake City. As well as the armada of human warships, the newly enlarged portals above Earth were also shooting out a swarm of sensor satellites to enhance Strikeback’s intelligence-gathering. The G8Turing plotted the byzantine weave of ship vectors. In orbit, Olyix transport ships were being massacred in their hundreds. Deliverance ships were fighting a furious rearguard action against the deluge of cruisers, but there was nothing they could do to stop the Calmissiles.
‘You smashed it, boss,’ Eldlund exclaimed. ‘We’re killing them!’
‘Damn right,’ Loi agreed. ‘Here comes the ground wave.’
Thousands of cruisers were descending into the Earth’s upper atmosphere, unleashing a deluge of Calmissiles towards the Olyix ships that ringed every surviving city. Loi bit on his lip. They couldn’t afford to use nukes close to the overstressed shields, but neither could they avoid using them. This phase had to be convincing.
‘Loi, stand by,’ Johnston ordered.
The tactical splash gave Loi the three best portal options for deployment. ‘Three and five,’ he decided.
‘I concur,’ Eldlund said.
‘Brace yourselves.’
‘Got it,’ Lim said.
All three suits leant forwards.
In front of them, the grey pseudo-centre of portals three and five melted backwards, allowing a different, more vacant, texture of grey to resolve. Air howled in, bringing a flurry of dirt and dust that churned vigorously around the walls. The suits swayed fractionally from the impact, but held position.
Loi consulted the tactical display again. Down in South America and over in China, five-megaton warheads were detonating twenty to thirty kilometres above the ground, close to the convoys of Olyix transport ships lifting off. When the shockwaves slammed down, ships lurched around violently before beginning their fatal nosedives. Those that hadn’t yet launched juddered about on the ground, their hulls thudding into rocks and slopes, crumpling on impact. In response, the Deliverance ships bombarding the city shields diverted their energy beams upwards, targeting the incoming
