“Aye, sir.”
“Godspeed, Captain.”
The Second Chance’s big life-support wheel finished its emergency despin procedure, eliminating the problem of precession, which had been screwing up their maneuvering ability.
“Full acceleration,” Tu Lee ordered the pilot. She’d been captain for a week now, taking over when the ship docked after its last mission. The navy had sent it on a deep scouting mission three hundred light-years from the Commonwealth. It didn’t have the speed of any of the new scoutships, but it beat them hands down on endurance. It also had the kind of delta-V reserve that only the new warships could match.
Their plasma rockets responded smoothly to the pilot’s instructions, producing one and a half gees acceleration. They were a thousand kilometers above Anshun’s nightside equator, and curving around above the second largest ocean. The big portals at the front of the bridge were showing brilliant white flares of nukes detonating below them. Tu Lee barred her teeth in fury at the devastation. For her the light was carefully color-coded and intensity-graded; for anyone on the surface it was near-certain death.
“Laroch, have we got a pattern for the emergence sequence yet?” she asked.
“I can confirm there’s forty-eight wormholes,” said Laroch, who was operating the sensor console. “But they keep jumping around at random. The only constant is their altitude, about one and a half thousand klicks.”
“Okay, let’s keep under that level, and track the bombardment projectiles in range. Weapons, fire whenever we get a lock. Pilot, if there’s a cluster, get us in range.”
“Incoming,” Laroch called.
Eight alien missiles hurtled toward the Second Chance. The pilot vectored their plasma rockets, altering trajectory. Plasma lances fired out from the starship’s midsection, ripping across space before bursting apart on the missiles’ force fields. Lasers locked on, pumping gigawatts of energy, straining the force fields badly. The plasma lances fired again finally overloading the missiles’ shielding. Multiple detonations blossomed silently above the planet, their plasma clouds merging into a seething patch of pure light over fifty kilometers across.
“Batch of sixteen projectiles emerged,” Laroch called out. “Heading for the planet.”
The bridge portals had them tagged, green needles with vector digits flicking around at high speed. Tu Lee called up the ship’s own missile launch command, and fired a volley of interceptors. As they leaped away at fifty gees she loaded in a sequential pattern of diverted energy functions for their warheads. The interceptors split apart into a cascade of independently targeted vehicles, rocket exhausts expanding like a starburst of lightning bolts as they spread out in pursuit of the alien projectiles. Megaton warheads detonated, a chain of dazzling lightpoints distorting the planet’s ionosphere in huge undulations, their diverted energy function sending huge emp effects rippling out.
Several of the alien weapons immediately went dead, their exhausts fading away as they tumbled inertly toward the dark landscape hundreds of kilometers below. A second barrage of warheads detonated. This time the diverted energy was channeled into one-shot X-ray lasers, directing seventy percent of the explosion’s power into a single slender beam of ultrahard radiation. Every remaining projectile broke apart, glowing debris flying outward in sinister mimicry of a meteorite shower’s splendor.
Four more wormholes opened close to the Second Chance; thirty-two missiles flew out from each. Delicate fans of sensor radiation stroked against the starship. The gee force on the bridge swung around, pressing Tu Lee into the side of her chair. Straps tightened around her shoulders and waist, holding her in place.
“There might be a lot of them,” Laroch said. “But their software is useless. I’m picking up a lot of microwave emissions from the wormholes; the missiles are being continuously updated and guided.”
The Second Chance fired volley after volley of plasma lances at the new attackers as they closed at twenty gees. A massive series of nuclear explosions turned space outside the starship a glaring uniform white. Waves of thin plasma slithered across the outer force field, shaking the superstructure. Tu Lee could hear loud metallic groans as the hull twisted and flexed from the pummeling. It was as if they were flying through a star’s corona, blinded by the hot radiation glare and buffeted by relativistic particle currents. The starship streaked out of the energy storm, a shimmering scarlet bubble trailing long cataracts of hydrogen plasma. Twenty-four alien missiles chased around to intercept her.
Alarms were shrieking from every bridge console. Screens threw up systems schematics as the crew and the RI tried to reestablish functions.
“Jump us out,” Tu Lee ordered.
At the hyperdrive console, Lindsay Sanson activated the wormhole generator. Second Chance vanished from space above the planet.
“How bad is that software?” Tu Lee demanded.
“Strange,” Laroch said. “It’s very inflexible, nothing like as advanced as ours. It’s almost as if they don’t have smart programs.”
“We can use that,” Tu Lee said. She glanced at the main status display. The starship’s systems had suffered nothing too critical. Outside of some hull ablation and tank breaches, most of the damage had been absorbed by peripherals in the life-support wheel. Without the exploration and science teams they had only forty crew on board; no one was in any immediate danger. “Get everyone into suits,” she said as she called up a display of their missile reserves. “Then take us back.”
A lambent patch of turquoise light twisted out of nowhere eight hundred kilometers above Anshun’s capital Treloar. Second Chance leaped out of its center as the nimbus shrank away. The starship fired fifteen missiles, then her wormhole generator distorted space again and she vanished back into hyperspace. She reappeared almost instantaneously five thousand kilometers away, this time above Bromrine, a coastal city whose population of two hundred thousand was cowering under their protective force field dome. Another fifteen missiles were fired before she dived back into hyperspace.
She made another nine jumps around the planet, launching all one hundred seventy-three remaining missiles.
As soon as they were released, the missiles in each salvo fired their rockets briefly, spreading out from their launch point, then shut down. Their sensors scanned around, searching for a wormhole. When one emerged, their rockets ignited again, racing toward it at fifty gees. The alien projectiles barely had time to clear the wormhole rim before they were subjected to emp assault, electronic warfare, X-ray laser pulses, kinetic impacts, and nuclear blasts. Very few of them made it through to slam down against the planet.
Second Chance popped out of hyperspace again and began a quick data transmission to the beleaguered world below, telling the navy how they had mined near-orbit space. Eight wormholes emerged, encircling the starship at five hundred kilometers. Lindsay Sanson activated their hyperdrive. “Shit!”
“What?” Tu Lee asked. The bridge portals were still showing Anshun below them, its once-passive cloud formations swirling in agitation in the aftermath of the explosions.
“Interference. Space is so distorted from their wormholes we can’t open ours. It’s deliberate, they modified the quantum fluctuations to block us.”
“Move us,” Tu Lee yelled at the pilot.
Second Chance’s plasma drive came on. She began to accelerate at over three gees.
Another eight Prime wormholes emerged around the starship.
“Fuck you,” Tu Lee told the Primes.
Ninety-six missiles flew out of each wormhole.
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; he’d spent 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 around the outskirts of New Costa. Startled residents gaped up into the bright morning sky to see the dark shapes roaring upward to their high-altitude patrol stations. Force fields closed off the sky behind them.
With Augusta’s defenses activated, Nigel switched his attention back to the attack. His enhanced display showed the twenty-three Commonwealth planets where the alien wormholes intruded; the wormholes themselves manifested as tactile sensations, 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 marshaling 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 felt 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 that 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 around; 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 kilometers. 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 defense network, overriding local civil authorities. He sent combat aerobots rocketing skyward, firing as they went: big machines of unmistakable military ugliness. 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
