seriously wounded adults. Reception had been taken up by deep wounds and blood loss trauma. The nurse on entrance assessment took a quick look at the man they’d brought, declared him noncritical, and told them to find a place in the hallway for him. A team of people with brushes and shovels were still clearing away the shattered glass from the polished floorboards. Mark found a section they’d just cleaned, and set the patient down.
When he stood up he saw Simon Rand striding down the middle of the hallway, his orange robes hanging like ordinary cloth. Even Simon had been hit by glass; there was a long healskin patch on his hand, another on the bottom of his neck. His entourage was smaller than usual. A young woman walked beside him, dressed in a black top and jeans. It was Mellanie Rescorai, still enchantingly beautiful despite the sober determined expression locked on her face. Mark wasn’t at all surprised that she didn’t have a mark on her.
She saw him staring and offered a little rueful smile.
“Well there you go,” Carys said. “Just when you think your day can’t possibly get any worse.”
Mark trailed after Simon and Mellanie, with Carys, Yuri, and Olga following on behind. Simon reached the cracked and sagging marble portico at the front of the General Hospital, and raised his arms. “People, if you could gather around.”
The crowd on the lawns moved closer. There were a lot of dark angry looks directed at Mellanie.
She faced the crowd unflinchingly. “I know I’m not the most popular person in town right now,” she told them. “But I do have a link back into the unisphere. To give you a brief summary of what’s happening, twenty-four planets in the Commonwealth have been attacked.”
As she was talking Mark brought up the handheld array he was carrying. It couldn’t find a single network route back to the planetary cybersphere, let alone the unisphere. “No you haven’t,” he muttered.
Mellanie glanced over to him. She’d just finished telling them about Wessex beating off their assault. Her hand waved unobtrusively, fingers fluttering in a small echo of her virtual interface. Mark’s handheld array suddenly had a link to a unisphere node in Runwich; it was very low capacity, just enough to give him basic data functions. “I’m a reporter,” she said quietly. “I have some long-range inserts.”
That wasn’t right. Mark knew how networks functioned, and what she was saying was rubbish. He couldn’t puzzle out how she’d given him the link.
“Right now, the navy is organizing evacuations of every assaulted planet,” Mellanie said to the crowd. “CST’s Wessex station is arranging to open its remaining wormholes at every isolated community. Including us. It’s a difficult operation without a gateway at the far end, but the SI is helping them govern the process.”
Simon stepped forward. “It will be painful to leave, I know. But we must face reality here today, people. The hospital can’t cope. The rest of the planet is still suffering attacks of varying magnitude. Don’t think of this as evacuation, we are regrouping, that’s all. I will return. I will build my house anew. I would hope that all of you will come back with me.”
“When are we leaving?” Yuri asked. “How long have we got?”
“The navy’s drawing up a list,” Mellanie said. “We have to make sure that when the wormhole opens everyone from the surrounding countryside is here and ready to leave. We all go through at once.”
“Where are we on the list?” a voice from the crowd shouted.
Mellanie gave Simon a tense look.
“We’re number eight hundred and seventy-six,” Simon said.
The crowd was silent. Even Mark felt letdown. But at least there is a way out. He asked the handheld array to check if that was right, that they were truly that far down the list.
“Look at your little friend,” Carys said; her eyes were fixed on Mellanie. “She’s getting bad news.”
Mark glanced over in time to see Mellanie half turning from the crowd, hiding her face from them. Her eyes were wide with alarm. She mouthed some kind of obscenity and tugged at Simon’s robe. The two of them went into a huddle.
Mark told the handheld array to track down all official information on the current Elan situation. “No data available,” it told him bluntly.
Simon was holding his hands up again, appealing to the crowd who’d been watching him and Mellanie anxiously. “Slight change of plan,” he called above the edgy muttering. “We need to get out of town, now. If you have a vehicle that works, please drive it to the bus station. We will leave for the Highmarsh in convoy. That is where the wormhole will be opened. Can I ask all the able-bodied to help with carrying the injured to the station. Anyone with technical knowledge, we need the buses running; report to the station engineering office when you get there.”
People were starting to call out: “Why?”
“What’s happening?”
“Talk to us, Simon.”
“Tell us.”
Mellanie stood beside him. “The aliens are coming,” she said simply, and pointed at the sky behind them.
The crowd turned in unison to look at the dark rain clouds above the Trine’ba. There were two distinct patches of white fluorescence up there, as if a pair of suns were shining through. They were getting bigger and brighter.
It was the show of her lifetimes. Alessandra Baron knew nothing else would ever match live coverage of an alien attack. Thankfully she’d had the presence of mind to change out of her glamorous dress into the prim gray suit her wardrobe department kept ready for disasters and general bad news events. Now she sat masterfully behind her studio desk, perfect as moderator and guide while holograms of analysts, politicians, and junior navy officers flicked in and out of the show to answer her questions. They were interspaced with direct feeds from the assaulted planets whenever Bunny, the show’s producer, could get a decent link. The fact that the unisphere could be affected, that communications she’d taken for granted her whole lives suddenly now weren’t universal and guaranteed, troubled Alessandra almost as much as the nuclear explosions, though she kept her expression professionally impassive the whole time. And as for the shocking power losses when Wessex fought off the Prime wormholes, it brought everyone close to the battle, giving them a sense of involvement.
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, while 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 flared with shimmering opalescence as they warded off either debris or a howling radioactive hurricane. Reporters foolhardy enough to be standing close to the force fields revealed the new wastelands outside: 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 their suffering and sorrow and rage skillfully 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 St. Petersburg 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 cybersphere,” 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 were being carried on board on crude stretchers; 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 around 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 four-by-fours and pickup 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 that 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.
Fifty kilometers away, the rucked thunderclouds were sprouting a pair of radiant tumors, huge writhing bulges that were billowing downward. 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,
