The office tactical display showed starships going FTL to leave their planetary orbits. Wilson allowed himself to believe they would all be in time, that the flare radiation damage would be minimal. He knew that even if it was, even if the majority of the biosphere on each world survived, the inhabitants would want to leave. People would be terrified. Quite rightly. There would be a flood of refugees to the other side of the Commonwealth. Planetary governments would be unable to cope. There were still huge problems housing and supporting the existing refugees from the Lost23.
“Can we shut down the CST network?” he asked the President. Nigel Sheldon still hadn’t returned. His stationary image lurked in the office like a ghost at the proceedings. Wilson was starting to wonder if the Dynasty chief was running for his lifeboat.
“Excuse me?” Doi asked.
“We have to block any kind of mass panic escape from the worlds under attack. The rest of the Commonwealth won’t be able to deal with the population of forty-eight planets on the move. I doubt even CST can transport that many people.”
“If they stay they’ll suffer radiation sickness. You can’t make them endure that, and I’m certainly not going to enforce it.”
“Nobody inside a force field will come to any harm.”
“And what about people outside?”
“We’re getting reports that the CST stations have closed on most of the worlds under attack,” Rafael said.
“What?”
“It looks like Wessex has cut off all its links to phase two space.”
Both Wilson and Doi turned to Nigel Sheldon’s image. Wilson tried to send a message to the Dynasty chief’s unisphere level two private address, which was rejected. “Damn you. What are you doing?”
“Using CST wormholes to interfere with the Prime ones, I expect,” Rafael said.
“Have we got any information on that?” Wilson asked Anna.
“Admiral,” Dimitri said, “with respect, this is not relevant right now. You have to focus on Hell’s Gateway and how it can be disabled. While the Primes retain the ability to open wormholes into Commonwealth space, they can drop flare bomb after flare bomb into any of our stars. We have just shown them we possess doomsday weapons; and we have enough evidence that they are conducting a pogrom against us. Their retaliatory strike will be swift and utterly lethal. You must stop them. The next hour will decide whether there will even be a Commonwealth for people to move through.”
Wilson nodded slowly as he began his feedback breathing exercise. He could feel his hands shaking in the unnatural silence. The refugees had been a classic displacement diversion. Truth was, he didn’t want to make the next round of decisions. This is too much to ask one person. I’m not ready. A little self-derisive guffaw slipped out of his lips, bringing him strange looks. Exactly how long does it take to prepare? I’ve had three hundred years, goddamnit.
“Anna, tell the Cairo and the Baghdad to fly directly to Hell’s Gateway. They are to use quantumbusters against the Prime facilities they find there. I want those force fields broken, and the gateway generators destroyed.”
“Yes, sir.” She began to relay instructions to Fleet Command.
He studied the tactical display. Now he’d gone and done it, committed himself to accepting the responsibility, the decisions and orders were actually quite logical and easy. His heart was beating away normally inside his chest again.
“How long?” Doi asked.
“It’ll take them three days to get there, which might be too long, but then again it might not. And if they can’t get close to Hell’s Gateway they can kick the shit out of that star with quantumbusters. That should cause some damage to the Primes stationed there.”
“I understand,” Doi said. She sounded defeated, as if it were all over.
Wilson didn’t want to look at her. If the Primes started firing flare bombs at other stars, then the Commonwealth was as good as dead already. They had three days to implement such an action. I’ve given them three days.
The tactical display was showing him quantumbusters detonating to extinguish the flare bombs already active. The flares and the explosions combined were sending lethal torrents of radiation toward the hapless Commonwealth planets.
“Warn the planetary authorities,” Wilson said. “Tell people to get under cover.”
“They’re already doing that,” Rafael said. “Wilson, I’m sorry, but this has to be done.”
“Yes.” He took a deep breath, reviewing the tactical display as it showed him the radiation gushing out from the quantumbuster explosions that would ultimately result in the deaths of millions of people. On his order.
“Bad day,” Nigel Sheldon murmured. “And getting worse.”
His expanded mentality slipped into the arrays governing CST wormhole generators on Wessex. Traffic in and out of the station had already shut down on his earlier order, leaving the wormholes empty. He disconnected eight of them from their remote gateways, and pulled their exits back into the Wessex system. Sensors above the Big15 world located the Prime wormholes for him. Over three thousand ships had already come through. The Primes had also fired a flare bomb into the local star. Tokyo had launched a quantumbuster to knock it out.
“We’re going to lose the planet’s entire bloody harvest,” Alan Hutchinson groaned. “The force fields will protect Narrabri, but the continents are completely exposed.”
“I know.”
The quantumbuster detonated.
“Jesus fucking wept.” Alan Hutchinson spat. Sensors revealed the full damage that Prime and human weapons inflicted on the tormented star. “That’s more than quadrupled the radiation emission. All they have to do is keep on firing flare bombs at us. The cure is as bad as the problem.”
“Hang on, Alan. I might be able to stop this.” Nigel was tracking the Charybdis through a directional TD channel created by the ship’s drive. The frigate was closing fast on one of the Prime wormholes, and there was no sign of it on any hysradar in the system. So let’s hope the Primes can’t see it, either. “Are you ready?” he asked Otis.
“Yes, Dad.”
“Here we go.” Nigel issued a stream of instructions into the wormhole generators he commanded. This time he didn’t need help from the SI. CST had upgraded the Wessex RIs to manipulate the open-ended wormholes in an aggressive mode.
MorningLightMountain watched the human starships launch their superbombs into the stars where it had planted corona-rupture machines. In every case, the massive explosion eliminated its machines. It had not expected such retaliation. If they had such weapons, why hadn’t they used them against the staging post or its own homeworld? Surely their ethics wouldn’t prevent them?
One of its wormholes in the Wessex system was abruptly subjected to exotic interference as eight human wormholes transected it. MorningLightMountain was expecting that; it diverted power from reserve magflux extractors to help stabilize its wormhole. After analyzing the nature of the attack humans had used last time, it believed it could now counter them effectively. Certainly, it had modified its generator mechanisms to make them less susceptible to the instability overloads. Thousands of immotile clusters focused their attention on the wormhole, ready to counter whatever interference pattern was inflicted on the exotic fabric.
There was none. This was different. The human wormholes were somehow merging with its own, their energy input helping to maintain the fissure through spacetime. For a moment, MorningLightMountain didn’t understand at all. Then it realized it was now unable to close the wormhole. The humans were injecting so much energy into it they were stabilizing the fabric; they were also locking the exit in place within the Wessex system. There was a hole open directly into its staging post that it didn’t control.
MorningLightMountain tried to introduce instabilities, inducing resonances, modifying power frequency. The humans countered it all with ease. Sensors located a relativistic missile racing for the wormhole exit. MorningLightMountain strengthened the force field that covered the exit, and started pulling back the ships that had just gone through, clustering them in a defensive formation. Force fields inside the staging post area were strengthened. It had prepared for a relativistic explosion like last time in case the humans managed to engineer a strike. The damage should be minimal.
A starship materialized inside the force field covering the wormhole exit. It was difficult to detect: the hull was completely black, absorbing all electromagnetic radiation. MorningLightMountain knew it was there only because it partially eclipsed the drive contrails of its own ships outside. There had been no warning of its existence, no detectable superluminal quantum distortion waves that were the signature of human ships and missiles. They had built something new.
The ship moved swiftly into the wormhole exit. MorningLightMountain switched every available power source it had into the generator in one last frantic attempt to destabilize the wormhole. Nothing happened; the wormhole fabric remained perfectly constant as the humans countered every power surge. MorningLightMountain gathered its own ships around the generator, ready to fire. Sensors were also aligned in an attempt to learn something about the nature of the new drive.
The human ship emerged from the wormhole. MorningLightMountain’s ships fired every beam weapon they had at the intruder. It vanished.
“Second batch of flare bombs coming through,” Anna reported.
“Oh, Jesus,” Wilson exclaimed. The display showed him over thirty new devices had emerged, accelerating at a hundred gees toward their target stars. “Natasha?”
“If you can’t intercept the devices with Douvoir missiles, hit them with quantumbusters.”
“Son of a bitch.” Wilson nodded at Anna. “All right, authorize that; divert every Douvoir we have in proximity. Some of them must be able to hit a flare bomb.”
“Yes, sir.”
“One of us will run out of superweapons before the other,” Dimitri said. “That will decide who wins today.”
“That decides who wins, period,” Rafael said.
“Yes, Admiral.”
Nigel’s image flickered back into life. “I’ve done what I can,” he said. “We should see a result in the next quarter of an hour.”
Wilson quickly checked the Wessex section of the tactical display. One of the Prime wormholes had vanished. One? “What did you do?”
“Sent a ship through to Hell’s Gateway.”
Wilson looked at Anna and then Rafael, both of whom looked equally perplexed.
