Of all the hundreds of launch simulations she’d endured, not one of them prepared Pilot Major Anala Em Yulei for the actual thing. The Silver Sword rocket lifted Liberty mission 2,674 from the pad in a fury of sound and motion. Four-gee acceleration crushed her down into the couch, but still managed to shake her head from side to side inside the helmet. The instrument console became a blur; flight com’s voice was an indecipherable buzz in her earphones.
Booster separation came with an almighty jolt and she let out an involuntary grunt. Thirty seconds later, a loud crack ricocheted around the cabin and the aerodynamic shroud segments guarding the capsule fell away. After a further two and a half minutes the core stage was exhausted. The third stage ignited.
That was when everything she’d trained for changed. There had been a week of intense simulations, the flight manuals were rewritten, launch pad technicians worked for days without sleep preparing the rocket, and there was no missile payload. All for this—a direct order from the prime minister. This Liberty flight was to help track down Fallers somewhere on the Polas Sea. Her super-classified briefing from General Delores and the Cape’s senior PSR general explained that these Fallers had acquired atom bombs from the recent reactor “incident,” and they were pursuing the Warrior Angel in a hijacked ship, the Sziu. No, you don’t need to know why, only that she is no longer regarded as an enemy of the state. So it would be Anala’s job to update the Pericato, a marine ship that had been assigned to pursue the Sziu. Major Danny was in command, and Pericato had been equipped with short-range nuclear missiles they could deploy against the Fallers—eliminating Sziu’s stolen bombs.
The third-stage burn lasted for four minutes and fifteen seconds before it jettisoned. At the end of it, the Liberty capsule was in a polar orbit 180 kilometers above Bienvenido. Anala would pass over Lukarticar every ninety-one minutes as the world turned beneath her.
By the time she rotated the capsule so her largest port was oriented to the planet below, she had passed over the north of Indiland to approach the shore of Noemstok, the northern polar continent, with its massive skirt of ice. Contact with flight com had ended just before third stage shutoff; their array of receiver stations across Lamaran wasn’t set up for this kind of flight. Communications would be dropping in and out several times each orbit.
After checking that all the capsule systems were nominal, Anala started to remove the pressure suit, but the sight through the port kept distracting her. No one had ever seen Bienvenido from polar orbit before. The terminator line, bisecting the pristine white cover of ice, was so much sharper here than it ever was over land or ocean. Her breath caught as she saw the pale-green light curtains of a borealis storm serpentining across hundreds of kilometers of darkness. And amazingly, Delores was right: She could indeed make out individual ice floes adrift in the placid turquoise sea, no bigger than ships. Perhaps she would be able to see the Gothora III and the Sziu after all. That had always seemed the most ridiculous aspect of the mission, the one that had sent her anger surging to dangerous levels—levels that almost triggered insubordination. I gave up a mission to kill a Tree for this pitiful tourist flight?
But the prime minister himself had shaken her hand as she went into the gantry lift. “I cannot overemphasize how important this mission is,” he told her. “Bienvenido’s very survival may depend on it.”
“You can rely on me, sir,” she answered, all the while wanting to slap his pudgy old face. Years of discipline kept her outwardly calm and respectful, but how it hurt.
Now, though, she wasn’t so sure. To change a Liberty flight was an act of the purest desperation. And knowing a nest of Fallers had stolen some atom bombs—that they’d already detonated one—was making her reevaluate her priorities. The government needed this mission, needed her skills, her professionalism.
And—oh—the view…
The north pole passed by and the capsule was heading back out over the western Delos Sea toward the northern coast of Rachweith, which was deep into night. Volcanoes glowed among the spines of the mountains that ran east–west along that landmass; she could see the slim streams of lava eking down the slopes, poisonous ebony vapors billowing high to throttle the pure-white water clouds scudding in from the sea.
Out over the Ashla Ocean she acquired the New Angeles station, and flight com’s voice made a welcome return to her earphones. It was a frantic five minutes while she confirmed instrument readings and they scrutinized her telemetry.
“Systems nominal, Liberty two-six-seven-four,” flight com reported as the capsule flew over the Huang Archipelago. “Space Vigilance Office reports your orbital track is good. You have a go from the mission flight commander.”
“Roger that, flight com,” she acknowledged.
“What’s your view like?” Adolphus asked.
Anala was so startled by the breach in protocol she took a moment to reply, remembering mission 2,673 when Colonel Matej had spoken directly to Ry once the missile anomalies had begun. “View is good, sir. I’m in the umbra right now, but I can see town streetlights across Aflar Province, and earlier I could see ice floes.”
“Good, good. Best wishes, comrade.”
“Thank you, sir.” There were only a few more minutes of communication with flight com until she crossed over Rakwesh Province to soar above the Wingrush Sea, then contact was lost again.
Lukarticar was bigger than Noemstok, with several mountain ranges curving up out of the snowfields to straddle the terminator line. Then she was above the Polas Sea with Macbride Sound just visible to the west before the world curved away, and her first assessment was coming up fast. Nixi tubes in the navigation board produced the coordinates, and she adjusted the sextant accordingly, peering keenly through the lens.
“Back with you,” flight com announced.
“I can see the Pericato,” Anala exclaimed, trying to keep her voice level and emotionless, but right in the center of the lens was a long wake coming from the marine ship that sent her heart racing. “It’s heading southwest.”
“Good job, Liberty two-six-seven-four. Attempt contact, please.”
“Roger that.” She pushed off and flicked switches on the communications board, changing frequencies, pushing more power to the omnidirectional antenna’s transmission circuit. “This is Liberty flight two-six-seven-four calling marine polar expedition. Do you read me, Major Danny?” Anala called three times, watching the ship sliding away underneath then behind her before she received an answer.
“This is Major Danny, receiving you, Liberty two-six-seven-four. Strength seven.”
“Roger that. Flight com, confirm contact with marine expedition.”
“Well done, Liberty. We’re going to get you to do some service module housekeeping now. Next time you pass over the Polas Sea, you will be free to begin Operation High Bird.”
“Roger that. Cloud cover minimal at this time. Some heavy weather accumulating to the north, but it looks like an easterly wind.”
“Okay. The service module manager wants you to stir lox tanks three through seven, then check the pressure readings.”
“Roger, flight com.”
She spent the next twenty minutes on the dull but essential tasks that occupied 90 percent of every astronaut’s flight. Clicking switches, taking readings, firing the reaction control thrusters in tiny bursts. The Liberty glided along Lamaran’s eastern seaboard. She could see the Salalsav Mountains guarding the Desert of Bone from any clouds coming off the Eastath Ocean. Picked out the small white V’s of boats off the coast as they powered their way between ports using the common trade routes just a few kilometers out from land. Practiced searching them out with binoculars. Then she was actually passing over Cape Ingmar, seeing the familiar pattern of hangars and launch pads—so much smaller now.
Second observation assessment: seeing if she could locate her two recovery ships heading north. The sea was eerily uniform. Then she saw a pair of tiny white splinters side by side—minute wakes.
“Got them,” she called. And read out their coordinates so flight com could confirm the sighting.
Two ships alone amid the vast blue ocean. Nothing else ventured so far from Lamaran. That chilled her.
The south pole passed below the capsule and Anala fired the reaction control thrusters to perform a minute attitude correction, stabilizing the craft so the port was aligned directly down onto the planet. She gripped the fabric handhold at the side of the toughened multilayered glass and stared at the coastline now slipping into view. This was her eighteenth pass over Lukarticar, and she was fighting fatigue as the track carried her directly along the eastern side of Macbride Sound, which was just on the terminator line. She peered down at the crinkled edge as the sunlight crept across it, seeing white dots of ice floes drifting imperceptibly from the glacier walls they’d fallen from. Still no sign of the Sziu’s wake. Where in Uracus is it hiding?
The radio crackled with static as the omnidirectional antenna picked up a carrier wave. She blinked, frowning as her concentration was disturbed. The Liberty wasn’t far enough north to pick up a signal from the Pericato yet.
“Hello, Anala,” a voice said in her earphones. “I always knew you’d make it into space.”
“Oh, Great Giu! Ry?”
Flying above the sea for eight hours was a relatively smooth experience. It was only when the Discovery turned south and began its journey across Lukarticar’s empty snowscape that the blimp began to quiver. Demitri was combating the squalling winds and sudden flurries of loose snow that whirled up into the air like slow-motion fountains. The engine pitch became a constant variable, while the fans tilted up and down repeatedly as he fought to counteract the buffeting.
Inside the gondola, Florian could really feel the side winds and unexpected downdrafts knocking the Discovery about. By then he was using motion sickness counter-routines the whole time—to little effect. He hadn’t risked eating anything for hours. That was the first time he began to acknowledge that Commonwealth technology might not be omnipotent. Twilight had already claimed the short polar day, so that just as the rumpled snowfields dwindled to gray and the outside temperature dropped still farther, the Discovery was reduced to five hundred meters altitude. He really didn’t think that was high enough.
His u-shadow lacked routines for smoothing down his anxiety. There were plenty of proficient chemical remedies for that in the various medical kits they were carrying, but unfortunately none of them were near his seat. So he just clamped his jaw shut and summoned up some of his old mindscape files. He thought he could refine them with the new crafting and blending tools the space machine had gifted to him. But once he started to review them, he realized how crass they were compared with what he could do now.
Instead, he had his enriched perception of the pitiless white-and-blue world that was Lukarticar combine with symphonic music, creating a new and fabulously baroque mindscape—becoming a bird and flying clean and straight over the ice-conquered universe toward a sliver of dawn that was forever receding. It had edge and eeriness, with the rhythm slowly increasing along with the bird’s speed, cold wind flowing over leather wings, exhilaration merging with danger, the thrill building along with expectancy…He barely had to compose anything, the hypnotic mindscape flowed into creation so naturally—
“You need to start getting ready.”
Florian was abruptly back in the real world. He suspended the file and looked around the cramped gondola. Everyone was stirring, reaching for their rucksacks. His u-shadow showed him the blimp’s sensor imagery. Demitri was holding them steady into a twenty-three kph wind coming from the pole, barely a hundred meters above the wind-sculpted snow ridges. And below them lay the imposing bulk of the Viscount.
Florian pulled down his rucksack and took out the small package that was his environment-maintenance suit, which looked like a neatly folded black polythene bag. Reluctantly, he stripped down to his cotton underwear and told his u-shadow to open the e-m suit. Tiny ridges of plyplastic running along the fabric turned flaccid, allowing it to concertina out into what resembled a pair of shiny overalls similar to the kind garage mechanics wore, but with integral boots. Everyone else was getting into theirs. With a shrug—and because it was chilly with nothing else to protect him—Florian pulled it on, including the hood. Icons popped up into his exovision, and he set temperature levels and tightness. The fabric gripped him firmly, and his skin immediately warmed—a sensation like standing out in the summer sun. Some old grumpy part of his mind didn’t believe it would stay that warm once he stepped outside the gondola.
“Force field skeleton,” Paula reminded him.
This part he was actually looking forward to. The protective skeleton suit was similar to the e-m suit, but with its generator systems occupying integral ribs that came close to imitating a human skeleton. It fit snugly, and he ran through its functions just like he’d practiced back at the farmhouse.
“Everyone ready?” Demitri asked.
“Let’s go,” Kysandra said.
Exovision schematics showed Florian the Discovery compressing helium from its gas cells, storing it in small onboard tanks. The propulsion fans whined loudly, holding the blimp stable as it sank toward the ground. Lights came on around the base of the gondola, shining down on the glittering snow.
“Twenty meters,” Demitri announced. “Picking up some microburst winds. Get us anchored, please.”
The gondola door expanded, and ice particles swirled in. Florian watched Marek and Valeri slide down the rope ladder. He switched to the gondola fuselage sensors. Valeri stood still under the tail, running a full field function scan, alert for any nearby hostiles. Marek collected the cables that had unwound from the nose; both of them ended in field anchors—small globes of malmetal. He shoved one down into the crusty snow. Eight separate pinions shot out, curving down and around through the hard-packed subsurface ice like fast-growing roots, holding the cable fast. Marek walked thirty meters and applied the second cable’s anchor.
“Secure,” he reported.
Florian felt the fans slowly spin down.
“It’s holding,” Demitri said. “Well inside stress parameters.”
Fergus was next down the rope ladder. Florian ordered the e-m suit’s hood to cover his face. It flowed over his cheeks and chin like a dry liquid to protect him. He followed Ry down through the pool of light underneath the gondola. And—amazingly—the e-m suit did regulate his body temperature at a steady thirty-seven degrees. Air temperature was registering as minus forty-two.
“Damn,” Ry sent across the general link. “I wish our space suits were this good.”
Florian looked around. There was the base of the gondola glaring above him, glittery dense snow under his feet—and nothing else. Beyond the illuminated patch, the polar night was absolute; they were too far south for any backscatter illumination from the Tree Ring. He couldn’t even see a ge-eagle, though twenty of them circled overhead.
Paula and Fergus walked out of the light and vanished. Visual enhancement and infrared cut in, allowing him to follow them as they moved off.
“Heads up,” Demitri announced. He dropped the first equipment case out of the gondola. Florian and the others spent the next ten minutes picking up and stacking the cargo he threw down to them.
“That’s interesting,” Valeri said. “The drones are picking up a new radio signal.”
Florian couldn’t help it: His stomach muscles tensed up, and he started searching around for seibears.
“Where?” Kysandra asked smoothly.
“Above us,” Valeri said. “One hundred and seventy-eight kilometers, to be exact. There’s a Liberty capsule in polar orbit.”
“No way,” Ry muttered.
And now Florian was tilting his head back, searching through the haze of windborne ice particles. His u-shadow pulled the exact coordinate from the drone, and bracketed the tiny gray dot as it slid low across the western horizon.
“They’re looking for us,” Kysandra said. “They must be pretty desperate to use a Liberty.”
“You’d be surprised how much you can see from low orbit,” Valeri said. “At one time in the twenty-first century, there were hundreds of spy satellites orbiting Earth, every nation busy watching their enemies.”
Florian glanced at the gondola and its intense white lights. “Will they be able to see us? We are kind of bright.”
“Let’s not risk it,” Kysandra said. “Demitri, kill the lights until the capsule’s over the horizon.”
The lights went off. Florian had to turn up his infrared reception.
“The pilot is talking,” Valeri said. “She must be in range of a ship somewhere.”
“We’ll get the drones looking for it,” Kysandra said.
“She?” Ry asked. “Can I hear the broadcast, please?”
Florian listened. A female voice amid plenty of static, which his u-shadow worked to filter out, giving him a clipped conversation, typical of military types—rather, half a conversation. The drone over the Straits of Tiree couldn’t pick up the ship’s answering transmissions.
“It’s Anala!” Ry exclaimed. “I know her. She was next on the flight list. They must have changed her mission because of us. Giu, she’ll be pissed at that.”
“Going behind the horizon,” Valeri said as Anala’s voice collapsed into a distortion hash, then fell silent.
“Okay, lights back on,” Kysandra said. “We’ll have to go dark and silent every time she’s overhead. Load the orbit parameter into your u-shadows everyone, please.”
The gondola lights returned, and Demitri threw down the next case.
“Ry, would she be an ally?” Kysandra asked.
“She’s a good officer,” Ry said. “I don’t want to ruin anything for her.”
“Fair enough.”
“We’re ready,” Paula said. “Florian, Ry, activate your force fields, please.”
Florian did as he was told. Back when they were planning this, nobody could quite work out what would happen when a disruptor pulse struck ice. Explosion? Vapor jet? Geyser of boiling water?
Five hundred meters away, a mellow purple-white haze flared out, forcing the surrounding snowscape into sharp focus. He could see two figures silhouetted against the aurora. Then a wide circle of snow burst upward atop a furious blast of steam, as if a rocket motor had just ignited. Static seethed through the smog, sending weird twisters of light flickering along the plume. Lightning forks skewered out, discharging into the snowfield. Three of them lashed the Discovery’s envelope and Florian flinched, ducking instinctively as they crackled overhead.
Then the purple radiance faded away. A few more static waves rippled through the dispersing cloud, and darkness swept back in.
“That cut down about eight meters,” Paula said, “but it was a low power pulse. Second one now.”
Purple light flashed across the snowfield again.
For the whole flight, Paula and the ANAdroids had been studying the scans being relayed to them from the ge-eagles. They’d decided to aim for the middle of the colony starship, just behind the point where it had bent on impact. Viscount had a simple enough design, consisting of a long spindle to which various modules and compartments were attached, allowing for multiple redundancy and easy manufacture. The front—which was mainly force field generators, regrav units, and the ultradrive systems—had taken a lot of damage when it came down. From the scans, it seemed like the majority of cylindrical cargo modules that were clumped around the rear section had survived—if not still attached to the starship’s primary axis, then strewn around the landing zone before the snow and ice engulfed them.
It took Paula three hours to tunnel down to the Viscount’s hull. Twice she had to stop for ten minutes while the Liberty flew overhead. Then there was another hour of more delicate disruptor pulses clearing a route through the clustered modules to an airlock.
Valeri and Fergus opened a maintenance hatch next to the airlock, and spent a quarter of an hour trying to reactivate the malmetal.
“No good,” Fergus said eventually. “Three thousand years in the ice has screwed it completely.”
Paula turned her disruptor pulse to the lowest power level and punched cleanly through the airlock instead.
They followed her in, shining wide-angle torches that filled the interior with a uniform white light. Every surface was covered in a carpet of fine ice granules, creating a shimmering disorderly chamber of opalescent rainbows. Florian found it bad enough trying to keep his balance as he walked along the sloping corridor. The chromatic dazzle made it worse, and visual clues didn’t help. The corridor was clearly a radial one, extending out from the starship’s central spindle. When in flight, gravity was always oriented toward the aft end; that meant he was walking along one of the walls.
Viscount was dead. He accepted that at some deep instinctive level. Beneath the victorious layer of ice, the starship’s structure seemed almost pristine, suspended perfectly in its frigid tomb, waiting only for the kiss of warmth to awaken. But the extreme cold hadn’t preserved it. The long millennia of exposure to nothing but subzero temperature and darkness had permeated every molecule, bringing only extinction.
“I’m concerned about cold-fatigue,” Valeri said. “My scan is showing diminished molecular integrity in the structure all around. The starship is fragile, so please tread lightly.”
Florian stopped midstep, but everyone else carried on, so he shrugged and followed, just taking extra care now to make each footfall a light one.
They came to the end of the corridor. Three malmetal doors glimmered softly beneath their ice cloaks, opening onto the transit tubes that ran through the ship. The ANAdroids ignored them and went to work on a small hatch beside them. When the cover was removed, it exposed a neat array of slim cables and pipes worming into various plastic boxes.
Fergus began to plug modules into the exposed electronics. Florian tried not to flinch every time sparks shot out of the ancient cables. Small wisps of smoke began to curl upward. Several times, lights around the malmetal doors flickered a pale green-white before fading away again. He wasn’t sure, but one time he thought the malmetal itself twitched. Grains of ice drifted gently down to the floor. With that first hint that the starship might not be completely dead, he kept looking around to see if Fergus could animate anything else.
“Got it,” Fergus announced. “The wiring in here is so much powdered crud, but I’m shunting power into a nexus. It’s frying some processors, but a couple are tough enough to withstand the surge if I bring the voltage up slowly. Ah, here we go.”
“What’s he trying to do?” Florian asked Paula quietly.
“Power up a local node. The Viscount has a distributed network, so unless there was a catastrophic dataloss when it came down, the node should be able to tell us exactly where we are.”
“Where we are?”
“In the ship. Once we know that, we know the location of every cargo compartment in relation to us. And we have the Viscount’s complete manifest.”
“Ah. Right.”
“There’s considerable damage to the micronet,” Fergus said, “but there are valid caches. I’m initiating the bootup in safe-base; the software should be able to work around the damage.”
Florian started to worry. If pushing a few millivolts through a processor blew most of it, what hope did they ever have of reactivating a Neumann synthesizer or a wormhole?
“Got it,” Fergus said.
A three-dimensional image of the Viscount opened up in Florian’s exovision. Their location amid the terrific complexity of shadowy lines was indicated by a purple star.
“Okay,” Paula said. “That gives us HGT54b as the most convenient.”
The cylindrical cargo compartment she nominated glowed lime green in Florian’s exovision. He sighed. They’d have to tunnel farther through the ice to reach it.
It took another seventy minutes (with one pause to let the Liberty fly past), which he spent back up on the surface again. Every couple of minutes, the tunnel entrance would belch out a thick jet of steam that melted yet more of the wall. When he ventured back down, the tunnel wall was impossibly slick, like a glossy diamond. Demitri had to use a molecular severance rifle to break up the surface and give them some traction; otherwise they would have slid down the entire length.
The new excavation branched from the airlock where they’d entered the Viscount, curving around parallel to the hull then angling down. It ended in the silver-gray wall of cargo compartment HGT54b. Heat and seething steam had already shredded the surface of its protective foam. Valeri and Demitri started applying powerblades to the remaining insulation, shaving off long strips that crumbled apart as they fell to the floor. Before long, they came to the metalloceramic bulkhead itself.
“Fragile from cold-fatigue, of course,” Valeri said. He inserted his blade carefully and cut a neat circle about a meter and a half wide. He and Demitri gingerly eased it out.
Somehow the blackness inside the cargo compartment was even more profound than it had been in the starship. Demitri climbed in. The other ANAdroids started handing him equipment packs.
“You are probably safer sleeping in there,” Marek said. “I will stind—stand watch on the surface in case any seibears show up, Faller or otherwise.”
Florian gazed at the intimidatingly black hole again. He hadn’t even realized how late it was until the ANAdroid mentioned sleep. “In there?” He wasn’t sure why, but the cargo compartment was stirring a mild claustrophobia, making breathing more of an effort than usual.
“Yes,” Paula said. “I don’t want us split up.”
“All right.”
Once he clambered inside, the forty-degree angle the whole starship was resting at became obvious. There wasn’t much room, which didn’t help Florian’s feeling of confinement; the cylinder was divided up by sheets of reinforced carbon grid-mesh, forming smaller subcompartments that held the cargo in place. A hexagonal-cross-section corridor ran down the center, allowing full access. Movement was difficult, the steep angle turning everything into a half climb.
HGT54b was carrying industrial production systems and four wormholes. Several of the heavier neumanonic synthesizers had broken free on impact and smashed into their neighbors in a disastrous domino effect, but that still left more than forty manufacturing systems intact. They were all covered in thick protective membranes, themselves layered in ice—but not as thickly here as directly inside the starship.
Paula and Demitri were clambering along the central access corridor, shining their torches into subcompartments, seeking visual confirmation of their field function scans.
“The wormhole generators are all intact,” Paula called out.
The ANAdroids started setting up heaters—simple metal cylinders a meter long and half as wide. One end was an intake grille, while the opposite end had long plyplastic strings dangling like particularly feeble tentacles.
Ry handed out meal packs. He and Florian sat on a broken metallurgical extruder while their self-cooking wrappers grilled ham-and-cheese sandwiches, and watched the ANAdroids clambering along the corridor, stretching the plyplastic strings along and feeding them into subcompartments. Once a string was in place, it expanded out into a hollow duct and stiffened into place.
The heater fans started up with a mild hum. Warm air gusted out of the ducts.
“It should take about ten hours of this heat soak to get the ambient temperature back up to zero,” Demitri said. “That should help with the reactivation. I don’t want to rush it.”
“Why won’t the wormhole generator work in the cold?” Ry asked.
“It was designed to operate in temperatures a lot lower than this,” Valeri said, “but cold along with the time it’s been down here…We don’t want to take any chances. You saw what happened to the electronics in the ship. Our chances will be improved if we can get some heat in here first. Plus, it makes it easier to make repairs.”
Florian glanced about the dark cramped space and worried what warmth would do to the frozen machinery, how expansion would shift things. He glanced at a couple of synthesizers that had crunched into each other; they weighed several tons each. The notion that more of them might be dislodged while he was sleeping added to his claustrophobia, and he gave up on the sandwich.
Trying to sleep now would be useless, but he was tired, so he unrolled his plyplastic mattress on top of a biochemical refiner and lay down, wondering if he should compose a new mindscape file that might divert his anxiety—
Florian woke up when drops of cold water dripped onto his nose. All the ice in HGT54b had melted, leaving the resultant droplets clinging to every surface like persistent morning dew. He hadn’t noticed the air getting hotter thanks to his e-m suit, which had maintained a constant body temperature while he slept, but now water was running across every piece of cargo, slicking their protective membranes as it formed slow runnels. The black grids dividing up the compartment were drizzling a light mist. Water was pooling at the bottom of the corridor. And for the first time since leaving the gondola, Florian could smell something: a curious bad air scent similar to the musk of a waltan fungus.
Overnight, the ANAdroids had rigged the inside of the compartment with lights. They’d also stripped the protective membrane off two of the wormhole generators and cleared some space around the big circular machines. The slim metal cases they’d brought with them were open, showing off an impressive collection of intricate tools and electronic gadgets. Sensor pads had been applied to the generator casings.
“More—morning,” Marek said cheerfully.
Florian checked his time display, surprised he’d slept for more than seven hours. “Where is everyone?” he asked. Only Marek, Fergus, and Valeri were left, gathered around the wormholes like devoted acolytes.
“On the sir—surface,” Marek told him. “There’s a breakfast pik—pik—pack if you want one.”
“Maybe later. How are you doing with the wormhole generators?”
“Warming nicely now. The pre—pro—protective membranes had cold-welded to them. Tick—took some scraping to got get off. We should be able to start initializang—zing in a couple of hours. Their systems seem to be mainly intact.”
“Mainly?”
“Yes. We knew they wouldn’t be perfectly prefect—perfect.”
Florian glanced around the cargo compartment again. Secondary routines flashed up turquoise identifier icons across the machines cocooned inside their glistening membranes. The potential locked away in this one space was phenomenal. Some of the synthesizers were even capable of full replication, building duplicates of themselves. If you coupled this single small trove of Commonwealth technology with all the knowledge Joey had given him, Bienvenido really would be building hyperdrive starships within twenty years. And this was only one small section of the Viscount’s cargo.
“I’m going up to the surface,” he announced.
A plyplastic door had been fixed across the hole cut in HGT54b’s side, keeping the precious heat in. It opened silently to let him pass. The lustrous ice tunnel was illuminated by small lights spaced uncomfortably far apart. His universe closed in oppressively again, not helped by him being alone on the awkward trek up to the surface.
The sun still hadn’t risen when he finally emerged out onto the murky snowscape. Bright white light was shining down from the base of the gondola, fluorescing the minute ice particles swirling idly through the air. The gloomy empty vista it exposed was even more incongruous given the entombed leviathan below his feet. He saw Kysandra, Paula, and Ry huddled together with Demitri underneath the gondola.
Paula looked around as he walked over. “We may have a problem,” she said.
“What’s happened?”
“The drones located the ship Anala was talking to. It’s the Pericato, a marine ship. And it’s also got nuclear weapons on board; the drone sensors detected their radiation signature.”
“Crud,” Florian grunted.
“That’s not the problem,” Paula said.
“Oh. What is?”
“The drones also located the Sziu. It’s heading southwest through the Straits of Tiree. The course it’s taking will bring it to the coast due north from here—the shortest distance from us. It seems the Fallers know we’re here. My guess is they’ll bring the atom bombs ashore and try to deploy them against us.”
Florian just managed to resist turning a full circle to try to catch whatever Faller-animal was spying on them. “Can the Gothora intercept them?”
“No. Jymoar is farther north than the Pericato.”
“So what do we do?”
“We’re assuming the warheads on the Pericato are short-range missiles,” Kysandra said. “The government developed the Aseri missile for Operation Reclaim—solid-fuel propellant with a fifteen-kilometer range. Good for taking out urban areas with a high concentration of Fallers. Should be useful against the Sziu, providing they know its location. At the moment they clearly don’t—they’re not on an interception course.”
“The drone also picked up Pericato’s radio transmissions,” Ry said. “Major Danny is in command.”
“You’d think he would’ve had enough of the Fallers on the Sziu by now,” Kysandra muttered.
“He wants another chance for his moment of glory, no doubt,” Paula said. “Port Chana harbor wasn’t anyone’s finest hour.”
“You’re going to tell him where the Sziu is?” Florian asked.
Even with most of her face covered by the e-m suit’s hood, Paula’s scowl was visible. “It’s our only option.”
“I just cannot trust the marines,” Kysandra said. “Section seven dreamed up a plan, Operation Overload, in case they ever confirmed my location. It involves bombarding me with nukes, and the marines would carry out the attack. Giving them our location, or even a hint of it…That’s asking a lot.”
“It would take them several days to reach us here,” Paula said. “The risk is small.”
“But why should we introduce any extra risks?”
“Fortunately, we have another option, or at least we can come at the problem from a different angle,” a grinning Ry said. “Someone else can tell Major Danny where the Sziu is; someone he’ll trust. And they won’t give us away.”
“You mean your friend?” Florian asked Ry. “The one in the Liberty?”
“I don’t think we have a choice,” Ry said. “We need to get the Sziu’s coordinates to the Pericato. And so far, Anala hasn’t seen the Sziu.”
“And you trust her?” Florian demanded.
“Completely,” Ry said. “But we need to do this quickly. Even if the Pericato sails to intercept Sziu right now, it’ll be touch and go if they can hit it before it reaches the coastline.”
“Time,” Kysandra said in dismay. “We cruised along for two hundred and fifty years, and now it’s suddenly acute. I crudding hate the irony.”
Florian linked to the drone that was circling high above the coast and saw the Sziu steaming southwest at full speed. A weaker sensor return gave him the marine ship behind it. Different sensors were tracking the steady radio signal of the Liberty capsule skimming the top of the atmosphere. Choice really didn’t come into it; this was simple logic. “For what it’s worth, my vote is to call Pilot Major Em Yulei.”
Anala stared out of the port in some crazy belief she could actually make out Ry down there somewhere.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Have you Fallen?” she whispered.
That wonderful chuckle of his filled her headphones. “No. But of course I would say that either way.”
That easy teasing—so him. Surely no Faller could ever truly copy that?
“So then why are you calling?”
“Anala, I’m going to tell you why we’re here in Lukarticar.”
“Why?” she asked automatically. No one at her preflight briefing could produce a reason other than that they might be seeking refuge from the Faller Apocalypse.
“We’ve been looking for the Viscount. Anala, we found her!”
“The Visc— No!” That wasn’t possible. The Viscount was practically a myth, just like the Warrior Angel. But she’s now very real.
“It’s buried under the ice. Anala, we’re trying to recover Commonwealth technology that’ll stop the Apocalypse.”
“You can do that?”
“We hope so. If we have enough time. So we need you to perform your mission and take out the Sziu without alerting the navy to where we are.”
She stared out of the port, across the terminator where the planet was in total darkness. Beyond that line, there was no way to distinguish between the snowfields of Lukarticar and the icy waters of the Polas Sea; both were completely black, as if that portion of the world had gone missing. “How can the Sziu be a problem for you?” she asked cautiously. “They briefed me—a proper briefing, security level one. You’re with the Warrior Angel now, and she has weapons. The greatest weapons on the planet.”
“And the Fallers have atom bombs. We can’t protect the Viscount if they detonate them. Anala, the marines have to intercept the Sziu. We know the Pericato is also carrying nuclear weapons. They have to stop the Fallers from reaching us.”
“I don’t know where the Sziu is. I can’t see it.”
“We can. Our sensors are tracking it, just like they’re tracking you. You can guide the marines to it.”
She listened numbly as he read out a string of latitude and longitude coordinates: Sziu’s speed and bearing. She so wanted to believe this was Ry, that there was hope, that the Viscount was genuine. But the other possibility was equally likely—that he had Fallen, that the location was a lie, that she’d send the Pericato on the wrong course, leaving the Fallers free to pursue the Gothora III. I don’t want to make this decision.
“That location you’ve given me is on the other side of the terminator. It’s in the dark, Ry; I can’t confirm it yet. If you’re right, the Sziu will be in daylight for my next pass. I can tell the Pericato then.”
“That’s too late, Anala. Major Danny has to catch them before they reach the coast. The only chance he has is if the Pericato starts after them now.”
“I can’t, Ry. I can’t do that.”
“This is what you’ve lived for, Anala, everything you’ve worked toward. This is your time to hit the Fallers, and hit them hard.”
“I have to have confirmation. You crudding know that. You know!”
“You trusted me before. Please, order the marines to intercept the Sziu. We’re so close to the Commonwealth systems. I’ve seen the starship, and it’s magnificent! We can fly across space again, Anala, real spaceflight, not just pissing about in orbit. We can get home to the Commonwealth. Don’t let that future go. Don’t let the Fallers win!”
“But I need verifiable data! And if you are Ry, you know this.” Even if you’re not Ry, you’ll have his memories and know it.
“The Fallers don’t have the technology to call a Liberty capsule. This is Commonwealth technology I’m using.”
“It’s a radio signal, Ry. That proves nothing.”
“What do you need, Anala? What will it take?”
“I need to see the Sziu.”
She waited as the coastline slipped past underneath, cursing her own timidity.
“Ask General Delores,” Ry said finally.
“What?”
“If you don’t trust me, tell General Delores what I’ve told you. Tell her we’ve given you the Sziu’s position. She should know the truth; she has access to the highest government officials. Remember Stonal, the PSR official that interviewed me? He can confirm the Warrior Angel has been attempting to contact the prime minister. We were trying to do it through Captain Chaing. We can be trusted, I promise. Ask her. You should be in range of the coastal tracking station soon.”
“Four minutes,” she said automatically. Then she hesitated, deciding he deserved one last offering of trust. She owed him that—owed his memory if all she was talking to now was his Faller copy. “Ry, Adolphus himself is at Cape Ingmar.”
“You are crudding kidding me!”
A slight smile lifted her lips—that surprised indignation seemed impossible to fake; she could even see the expression on his face. A face she really missed. “No, I’m not. My mission is that important to them.”
“Then that might make this a whole lot easier. There’s something you can say that he’ll know only comes from the Warrior Angel.”
So far, every orbit had seemed to take scant minutes. Now, of course, it took forever for the capsule to slide closer to Lamaran’s southern coast and contact with the ground station.
“We have acquisition, Liberty two-six-seven-four,” flight com’s voice came through level and calm, lush in its own professionalism. “Welcome back.”
“Put the prime minister on,” she replied. “Now.”
“Please repeat, Liberty two-six-seven-four?”
“Confirming request. Get the prime minister. I have a message for him.”
It didn’t take much imagination to picture the flight center with technicians at their consoles, trying hard not to look around, keeping their expressions neutral. Do your work. Always concentrate on the mission data, no matter what the crisis. Every minute of every day of every endless year of training hammered that home. And now this flight had come along, and nothing was the same anymore.
“This is Prime Minister Adolphus.”
“Sir, astronaut Ry Evine has been in contact. He’s with the Warrior Angel and Paula.” She heard it, actually heard it over the radio—a commotion in the flight center, people calling out in shock. Delores will have them all weeding the launch pads for a decade!
“Where are they?” Adolphus asked.
“They say they’ve found the Viscount, sir. And sir, they supplied me with proof of identity. They say that their opening offer to you was to use the machine in the basement; that if you heard that, you’ll know it’s them, that this is genuine.”
She paused, waiting without taking a breath.
“That’s a yes, Major Em Yulei. Only they would know that. You were talking to the Warrior Angel’s group.”
It took her entire willpower not to gasp in relief. “Sir, they gave me the coordinate for the Sziu, but I can’t confirm it visually; the location is in the night side. They ask for the Pericato to intercept it immediately. Ry said if we wait for visual confirmation, the Fallers’ atom bombs could destroy the Viscount, sir.”
“Give Major Danny the Sziu’s position and bearing immediately. He is to intercept at once; authorization ZZ57AA to use maximum force. Repeat, ZZ57AA. Please confirm.”
“Roger, sir. Authorization ZZ57AA.”
“Do it.”
Anala flicked switches on the communications panel and called the Pericato before it passed out of contact range.
Somewhere amid the all-engulfing dark, the marine ship changed course and went full steam ahead. Flight com seemed to forget their standard mission format: supplying endless capsule housekeeping procedures. Instead it was Adolphus who stayed online.
“Did they say what they were doing at the Viscount?” the prime minister asked as the capsule cleared the Lamaran coast just east of Port Chana.
“No, sir. Just that it has machines that can stop the Apocalypse.”
“And are they all there?”
“I only talked to Major Evine. He indicated he was in a group.”
“I see. You are to be commended, Major Em Yulei. You have carried out your duty in the finest tradition of the Astronaut Regiment.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“When you orbit Lukarticar again, will you be able to see the Sziu?”
“I hope so, sir.” If it is where Ry said it is. If that was Ry. If…
“Excellent. I need comprehensive updates, please.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And try and find out exactly what the Warrior Angel is doing.”
“I understand.”
It was another orbit that took an eternity, stretching her nerves far worse than waiting for the flight readiness exam results. The capsule seemed to crawl leisurely over the center of Lamaran, then traversed the entire length of Nilsson Sound, which was channeling a fierce storm directly inland. She lost contact with flight com (after they’d managed to get in a final twelve minutes of systems maintenance) just as she reached the edge of the Fire Archipelago. Then it was a long communication blackout as the Liberty curved lazily above the north pole and carried on over the Eastath Ocean, skirting well to the west of Fanrith before soaring across Tonari’s fjord-notched coast—both far beyond reach of any ground station. Then finally she was over the south pole again.
“So that went well,” Ry said. “Our drone caught the Pericato altering course.”
“Adolphus accepted your proof without question,” she said.
“Thank you, Anala. I know this was difficult for you.”
“Ry, why is the Warrior Angel talking to the prime minister? And what is the machine in the basement? What’s going on?”
“The negotiations were a contingency plan, that’s all, in case the Fallers win. They haven’t even started talking, not really.”
The whole idea was crazy. I know the government has always lied, but the scale of this deception…Adolphus and the Warrior Angel, in secret talks! “Whatever,” Anala said weakly. She checked the capsule’s orientation on the navigation panel and fired a quick burst of the reaction control thrusters, refining it. Then she aligned the sextant. “Ry, what’s on the Viscount that’ll defeat the Faller Apocalypse?”
“I’ve seen miracles down here, Anala. Synthesizers like mini-factories. Generators that convert mass directly into energy. Everything you need to start a new industrial world.”
“And weapons?”
“Somewhere, yes, but Paula has a plan. She thinks she can stop the Apocalypse from ever happening.”
“Who’s Paula?”
“She’s from the Commonwealth. That’s what happened on my mission; that’s what I saw: her arrival.”
“Great Giu,” she murmured. It was all so much to acknowledge. Right now she wished the capsule had another rocket stage attached—one she could fire and fly away from Bienvenido itself. Coasting out into the dark beyond, exploring the great Gulf. Maybe finding a new world, free from the disasters afflicting dear old Bienvenido.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw the nixi tubes count down to zero. She gripped the handhold tight and peered along the sextant.
There! Just in the daylight outside the terminator, eighty kilometers from Lukarticar’s rugged coast, a tiny white V was cutting through the rolling waves, heading purposefully southwest. Exactly where Ry had said.
The saddest whimper escaped from her lips as she snatched the binoculars from their pocket under the sextant. It took a moment to scan, but the ship leapt into her vision. Small, little more than a tiny black fleck against the pale turquoise. But real.
“I see it! Ry, I can see the Sziu.” Professionalism took over. She checked the sextant. Made a note of the alignment, ready to relay the figures to Major Danny.
“Good to hear that, Liberty two-six-seven-four.”
Anala gave a bitter laugh. He knew. Knew she’d doubted, but forgave her anyway. That was the real Ry, all right. “Welcome back, Pilot Major Evine.”
“Some people are crudding hard to please!”
“You want an easy life in the Astronaut Regiment?”
“Nah, never going to happen. Sorry I missed your Commencing Countdown party.”
“I didn’t have one. This mission was put together fast.”
“What? I am outraged! Every astronaut is entitled to their Commencing Countdown party.”
“I’m aware why you’re disappointed.”
“Weren’t you, too?”
“Possibly. Now cut the unauthorized chatter; I’ve got an update to give to the marines.” She studied the figures she’d made.
“Thank you.”
“Ry? The Sziu is making very good time. I’m not sure the Pericato can get within range before they make landfall.”
“Yeah. We have those numbers, too.”
Ry spent most of the morning sitting at the top end of compartment HGT54b, watching the sensor images coming in from the drones. One of the high-altitude craft was out over the ocean while the other was a hundred kilometers inland. Eight ge-eagles were circling the Sziu at a safe distance, providing a clear view as it battered its way through the waves. The drone sensors showed the Pericato making a valiant effort to intercept.
“They’re not going to make it,” he said when the Sziu was eight kilometers from the coast. The Pericato was twenty-two kilometers behind, and closing fast. But not fast enough.
“Let’s see if we can slow the Sziu down for them,” Paula said.
Ry’s exovision showed him the drone altering itself. The wide slender wings that allowed it to glide at such altitude began to contract. At the same time, Paula cut the power to its fans.
When the wings had shrunk to half their operational size, the drone stalled. The nose tipped down and it began to fall. Still Paula kept the wing retraction going until just the tips were left, sticking out of the oval fuselage as fins, providing a degree of stability as it streaked down, rapidly reaching its terminal velocity of 217 kilometers per hour.
“Too bad we can’t get it supersonic,” Paula said, “but the fans don’t have that much thrust.”
Ry was accessing a nose camera, watching the sea twelve kilometers below. Right at the center of the image was the Sziu. A small gray shape, starting to expand.
“Don’t forget the power cells,” Valeri said.
“The safety limiters are already offline,” Paula replied. “The smartnet will short them out at impact.”
Five kilometers altitude and the dive speed was exhilarating. Ry knew he was smiling.
Two kilometers, and individual features were becoming apparent on the Sziu’s deck. Machinery. Crates. Human-Fallers. Beast-Fallers. Paula switched the fans back on, shoving the drone down faster.
Ry changed to the images coming from the ge-eagles. Orientation flicked to horizontal, showing the Sziu silhouetted against the horizon, gray smoke from its twin stacks gushing up into the clear azure sky. The drone came plunging down silently, almost too fast to follow. It struck in the middle of the ship. Two explosions, overlapping—the first a tangle of smoke and flame surging up, the second a sphere of bright light ripping outward. Debris hurtled into the air, chunks trailing filthy vapor contrails.
“Damn!” Paula exclaimed. “Missed.”
“Missed?” Florian cried out. “What do you mean? That was a perfect hit.”
“I was aiming for the mid-hold. If it had hit there, chances were good that it would have punched through the bottom of the hull and sunk them. Instead it struck the back of the superstructure. The hull is intact. That was always the risk using a drone like this. And now they’re alert.”
The ge-eagles showed Ry flames and black smoke churning out of the wrecked superstructure. He groaned; the Sziu was still moving. “You slowed it down,” he said, but even he thought that sounded meager.
“That’s what we wanted,” Kysandra said. “The marines stand a chance now.”
Three minutes after the drone strike, Ry counted five of the huge Faller-animals standing on deck, carrying their pump-action bazookas, looking vigilantly up into the sky. Eight of the blue-skinned giant human-Fallers were with them, also keeping watch on the empty sky above. Half a dozen ordinary human-Fallers fought the superstructure fire.
Ry watched the displays, checking speed and distance for the Sziu and the Pericato. “The marines will be in range in nine minutes,” he said breathlessly. He’d watched the marines prepare the Aseri missiles. Two trailers were lashed to the deck, supporting large metal tubes. Marines in parkas had unwound thick electric cables from each trailer, laying them across the deck to a small canvas shelter at the front of the superstructure, where the launch control consoles had been set up. Then hydraulics had elevated both tubes to vertical. They were ready to fire. All they needed now was to get in range.
“Uh-oh,” Florian murmured.
“What?”
“Seibears,” Florian said. “Dozens of them.”
Ry checked the feed Florian was using. He was right. Three kilometers ahead of the Pericato, a pack of forty seibears were spread out over a patch of water a kilometer wide. More were swimming out toward them.
“I know that’s not good,” Paula said cautiously, “but I don’t see what they can do to stop the Pericato.”
“Board it?” Kysandra suggested.
“Unlikely at that speed; they’d get swatted aside.”
“Are they carrying weapons?”
“Good question.”
Paula guided a ge-eagle down toward the mass of seibears.
“Nothing,” she said as the ge-eagle scanned the huge amphibious creatures. “But they’re there for a purpose. I don’t like it.”
“Maybe we should warn Major Danny?” Ry said. “That’s a lot of Fallers to deal with.”
“Anala isn’t due overhead for another forty minutes,” Florian said.
“We can use the drone and ge-eagles to relay a radio signal directly. Danny will probably listen to us.”
“We’re missing something, I’m sure,” Paula said. “But Florian is right; we have to warn the marines.”
Ry listened to Kysandra contact Major Danny, warning him of the potential danger lurking ahead. But the marine major was proving recalcitrant. Talking directly to the Warrior Angel—trusting her—was clearly difficult for him. He didn’t want to change course to take them around the seibear pack, claiming that would allow the Sziu to reach the shore before the missiles were in range.
As Kysandra tried to keep her exasperation in check, Ry ordered one of the ge-eagles to fly over the Sziu’s projected landing point. “Crud!”
“What’s wrong?” Paula asked.
“Look at where they’re going to come ashore.”
The ge-eagle was showing a mass of seibears waiting patiently on the ice above the sea. More were lumbering toward them from the east and the west.
“How many?” Paula asked in a subdued voice.
“Must be over a hundred,” Ry said. “And they’re still coming.” As the ge-eagle swooped along the coastline, he saw another two of the great gray-white shapes surge up out of the water onto a broad chunk of floating ice.
“The Fallers must have taken over Lukarticar some time ago,” Paula said.
“They’re going to come here, aren’t they?” Ry said, hoping there wasn’t too much anxiety in his voice. His whole life had been spent on the front line combating the Faller menace, but an army of Faller-seibears charging the Viscount…
“They are a good choice to carry the atomic bombs,” Paula said. “Their size will give them considerable endurance, and they’re quite fast.”
“The Sziu might not make it ashore,” Paula said. “What’s Danny doing?”
“Being cautious,” Kysandra admitted.
Ry immediately switched links to the three ge-eagles flying watch around the Pericato. There was considerable activity on deck. Marines were appearing with Gatling guns that they were mounting on tripods.
“Nice,” Florian said. “They’ll be able to take out the seibears in the water, so whatever the Fallers were planning isn’t going to work.”
“Let’s just see how this plays out,” Paula said. “Demitri, how’s the wormhole generator coming?”
Ry looked down the length of HGT54b to where the ANAdroids were clustered around one of the generators. Almost all of the casing had been removed, exposing the tightly packed internal systems. He was used to the infernal complexity of a Liberty module, but this was an order of magnitude above. Instruments that were little more than hairs were worming out of the ANAdroids’ modules, infiltrating every fissure. Fergus and Valeri were perfectly still, absorbing the data being fed to them.
“Fifteen percent of the elements we’ve investigated so far are invalid,” Demitri reported. “We’re going to have to disassemble and rebuild.” He nodded at Marek, who was carefully removing the casing from a second wormhole generator. “Fortunately, we have a lot of spare parts.”
“How long?” Paula asked.
“A day, possibly. Hopefully no more.”
“But…the Sziu,” Florian stammered.
“The Pericato is almost in range,” Kysandra said. “They’ll be able to launch in another five minutes.”
Ry reviewed the latest speed and distance figures the ge-eagle data was producing. She was right. The Pericato would be in range of the Sziu while the ship was still over a kilometer from the shore.
“They don’t have to score a direct hit, surely,” Ry said, almost in prayer. “It’s an atom bomb, for Giu’s sake. They just have to detonate close.” The Sziu still had smoke wheezing out of the superstructure, and its speed had decreased further. It was having to alter course constantly now that it was so close to the coast to avoid the ice floes bobbing idly in the sea.
“Anything within a kilometer should do,” Paula said. “Major Danny knows that.”
Ry switched back to the ge-eagles over the Pericato. The ship was closing fast on the seibear pack. One of the Gatling guns opened up, stitching a small line of white bullet plumes through the undulating sea close to the lead seibear.
“What was that?” Paula demanded.
Ry couldn’t answer; he was watching the pack dive cleanly below the surface en masse. Within seconds, all of them were invisible, plunging deeper and deeper into the icy water. “Where are they going?” he marveled.
“The ge-eagles picked up a signal in our link band,” Paula said. “It came from the seibears. Have they acquired Advancer macrocellular clusters?”
“Roxwolf said breeder Fallers could pass any victim’s traits on,” Florian said in dismay. “As long as they’d eggsumed an Eliter, they’d have the pattern of the clusters.”
The remaining drone reported a radio signal broadcasting from the Pericato. “Where did they go?” Major Danny asked. “We lost sight of them.”
“I’m not sure,” Kysandra replied. “They just dived deep.”
“What’s down there?” Danny asked. “Should we change course?”
Ry watched Kysandra and Paula exchange a glance. Paula gave a minute shake of her head.
“No,” Kysandra said. “It is imperative you stop the Sziu.”
“Understood.”
“Can the seibears get through a metal hull?” Florian said.
“Cold makes the hull a lot more brittle than usual,” Paula said. “But even so—”
They all saw it at once. The Pericato juddered. And as soon as it settled, it began to curve around.
“We’re hit,” Danny’s voice shouted in near-panic. “Something under us. The rudder’s gone!”
The ship continued to turn.
“Did it breach the hull?” Kysandra asked.
“No. We’ve lost steering. And—oh, Giu!” The ship lurched again.
A ge-eagle swooped low and Ry spread out every sensor read across his exovision. Something was moving under the Pericato. Large dark shadows flitted about, clumped together tightly, and there was a weird gray-blue stain spreading out from the stern.
“They’re under you,” Kysandra said. “Danny, they’re under the ship!”
“That’s Faller blood in the water,” Paula said.
“We’re losing speed,” Danny said. “Something’s striking the propellers. Our engine is struggling. The gears are overloading.”
“Kamikaze,” Paula hissed.
“What?” Ry asked.
“They’re suiciding. The Faller-seibears are deliberately swimming into the propellers. It’ll kill them, but it’s wrecking the engines. Danny, you have to stop. They can only ruin your engines if the propellers are turning.”
Even as she said it, Ry saw the marines were firing their Gatling guns into the water all around, hitting nothing.
“Stop firing,” Kysandra ordered. “You’re wasting your ammunition.”
“If you have any grenades, drop them into the water at the stern of the ships,” Paula told him. “They’ll act like mini-depth-charges.”
“Like what?” Danny asked.
“Just do it!”
“How far away are they?” Florian asked nervously.
“Eighteen kilometers,” Ry told him. “The Sziu is three kilometers from shore.”
“Danny, launch a missile,” Kysandra said. “You’re not going to get closer. This is your best chance. The blast should be enough.”
“…distance…take me…launch codes…” Danny’s voice was interspersed with the sound of the Gatling guns.
“Save your ammunition!” Kysandra implored.
“Oh, crud,” Ry groaned. A seibear had risen up out of the water at the stern of the Pericato. It gripped a metal rail running down the hull and held itself in place. Another jumped on its back and in a moment was standing on its shoulders. Then the third came up, using the first two like a ladder, allowing it to move with incredible speed for something so bulky.
Marines swung their Gatling guns around and opened fire, the heavy-caliber rounds ripping the beast apart as it shoved its way on board. But another followed it. And two more emerged from the water under the port prow, forming another ladder.
The Gatlings fired again and again.
“Danny, fire the missiles,” Kysandra yelled. “Fire them!”
Even though it had slowed considerably, the Sziu was pulling away. It was less than two kilometers from the shore. Pericato was eighteen kilometers behind and dead in the water.
“…what I can…Arm them now…defend my command…” Danny said.
Ry saw a marine race down the steps at the side of the superstructure. It could have been Danny; he wasn’t sure. More seibears were coming up over the gunnels. The Gatling guns were firing constantly and the deck was slick with blue blood and gobbets of Faller flesh. He watched the desperate human figure duck a seibear as it was torn apart by bullets, then slip on the gore just as he reached the flimsy canvas shelter.
One of the Gatling guns fell silent. Two injured seibears had reached it at the same time. The marines operating it were ripped apart in seconds, their broken bodies flung at their terrified comrades.
A second Gatling gun ran out of ammunition, its barrel spinning wildly as a seibear sped toward it. Marines tried to stop it with carbines. Ry grimaced and hurriedly switched to another sensor feed. A grenade went off on the starboard side, slaughtering humans and Faller-seibears alike.
The marines on the prow made a strategic withdrawal into the base of the superstructure and five Faller-seibears hurried after them, tearing the metal hatch from its mountings. But they were too big to fit through. A fusillade of gunfire slammed out of the companionway inside, and the one reaching in to claw whatever fragile flesh it could find staggered backward, sticky turquoise blood streaming down its fur.
Two seibears arrived at the canvas shelter. It was pulled apart and flung over the gunwale. Danny and a missile technician were exposed, crouched over one of the launch consoles. Ry witnessed Danny’s fist slamming down on a big red button an instant before a seibear claw sliced through his throat. An arterial fountain of scarlet blood shot into the air for several seconds.
One of the Aseri missiles fired. Thick yellow smoke illuminated by an incandescent flame plume streaked out across the center of the Pericato, obscuring the massacre.
The Aseri flashed upward out of the bedlam, a dark-gray tube with a spiked nosecone. It scored a dense stream of glowing smoke through the clear polar air behind it, racing faster and faster. The noxious exhaust began to billow wide in its wake.
At two kilometers of altitude, the solid fuel was exhausted. The missile was traveling at supersonic speed. It split in half, the forward section carrying on in a neat parabola, guided by slender fins around its base. Behind it, the spent engine casing tumbled wildly end over end, beginning the long fall back to the water.
Ry’s u-shadow immediately acquired the feed from the ge-eagles above the Sziu. The ship was less than two kilometers from shore now, and making reasonable speed as it trailed wisps of smoke from the bottom of the superstructure. Seibears began launching themselves from the ice floes, sliding gracefully through the sea toward it. Several of them had established links to Fallers on the Sziu.
“Thirty seconds,” Paula said.
The Aseri warhead was traveling too fast for the ge-eagles to obtain a decent visual lock, but their other, more sophisticated senses tracked it hurtling down out of the sky. It struck the sea three kilometers aft of the Sziu, and detonated.
Every link from the ge-eagles at the coast and around the Pericato dropped out simultaneously. The drone switched to links from the ge-eagles farther inland.
An awed Ry watched the mushroom cloud rise—a dome of vapor as bright as any sun. Around it, the sea dipped for a moment before rushing back in, collapsing the crater. A column of dazzling white vapor surged up, then the blast’s wavefront streaked out horizontally, shredding the choppy surface into a foamy miasma. Ry held his breath as it struck the Sziu. The ship rocked about violently. Fallers and equipment were torn off the deck. Paint was already smoldering across the hull, bubbling and crisping to black. The bodies flung into the air ignited, burning to charcoal in less than a second before disintegrating. Then he could see no more as the vast storm of superheated steam roaring out from the explosion crashed across the abused ship and carried on toward the shore. Seibears on the ice floes were hurling themselves into the water.
“Will that protect them?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” Paula replied. “Look.”
The boiling surface of the steam whirlwind was distorting, bulging up in a giant ripple, as if some leviathan from the deeps was rushing out from the detonation point.
“What is that?” Florian murmured in awed alarm.
“Tsunami.”
They sent five of the surviving ge-eagles back toward the Sziu. The semi-organic birds took twenty minutes to fly through the hurricane-force winds howling out from the epicenter of the detonation. The whole area was still shrouded in hot churning cloud bands, though the core was starting to clear. Sensors probed through the thinning vapor. The fringes of the clouds were cooling rapidly now as the wind abated, turning to rain that had chilled to sleet by the time it reached the snowfield.
Along with dozens of ice floes, the Sziu had been driven onto the rocky shore. It lay there on its side across the shelf of a black pebble beach, its hull broken open from the impact. Waves lapped through the twisted fissures, flooding the engine room. Faller bodies were strewn across the deck, blackened lumps of meat slicked by the new drizzle of sleet. There was nothing left alive in the ship.
The ge-eagles dropped closer to the ground, scanning the weirdly disfigured snowscape. The radiation flash had evaporated and melted the surface layer of snow, swiftly followed by the fiery blast wave that had flattened any loosely piled slope or tough serac, slamming shut the jagged crevices. For a brief minute the surface had been awash with bubbling water, runnels carving a multitude of new channels. Then the deep polar temperature began to reassert itself, sucking away the temporary heat. The water refroze, producing a vast expanse of glazed ice flats that stretched from the shoreline more than two kilometers inland. There were strange lumps cloaked in grainy ice scattered across it at random—dead Faller-seibears, their fur singed and burnt away, ribbons of congealed blue blood spreading out from the corpses as if they’d sent out roots.
Sensors picked up movement on the edges of the ice crust. Forty-seven seibears were running south, spreading out across the mist-shrouded snowfield. Radiation points were coming from seven places.
“Uracus curse them,” Florian grunted. “They have the bombs.”
“If they can keep that pace up, we have about ten hours before they reach us,” Paula said.
Marek turned from the wormhole generator he was dismantling. “Looks like we’re on, then.”
Marek’s bioconstruct brain had no natural emotions, nothing that came from floods of hormones and neurochemical reactions. For a little over 250 years he’d used appropriate response algorithms to mimic human reactions: shock, disgust, sorrow, kindness, affection. Two hundred and fifty years of incorporating those effects into every situation. In doing so, they had ceased to become secondary routines as they merged into his primary thoughts. He rather enjoyed the notion that he was becoming more human—not simply knowing what a human should be feeling. His batch brothers—Demitri especially—weren’t convinced. The ANAdroids didn’t feel pleasure or pain, just tactile information from their nervous systems, so they saw the quirky development as evidence of his gradual decline, along with his vocal glitch.
Now, though, they had to admit he might have been right. He was scared by the approaching seibears and nukes, and that was a sensation he couldn’t shield from them; it was flooding across their shared gaiafield connection.
But it had to be done. The approaching Faller-seibears had to be tackled. And logically he, with his glitches and slightly wobbly coordination, was the most expendable of them all.
He made his way out of HGT54b to the surface along with the four humans, leaving his batch brothers working on the wormhole. The sky had an unbroken cover of high thin clouds, which defused the sunlight to a uniform glare. A gentle wind was blowing from the west, suffused with tiny ice crystals that pattered against his e-m suit. Overhead, the Discovery bobbed about, pulling at its anchor cables. The rope ladder flapped about beneath it. A grim-looking Florian caught hold and steadied it.
Paula reached for it, ready to start climbing.
“No,” Kysandra said. “You have to stay here.”
Paula hesitated, and Marek was intrigued by that. From what he’d seen over the last few weeks, and reviewing his much older original Nigel memories, Paula did not suffer from doubt—not any kind. She was the most confident and determined person in the Commonwealth.
“There’s seven atomic bombs heading this way, and only five of us,” Paula said. “You need me.”
“Without you, there is no plan. None of us will be able to break the Valatare barrier.”
“Neither will I,” Paula countered. “The ANAdroids don’t have imagination, but there’s enough of Nigel in there that when they’re given a problem they’ll know what equipment to manufacture. It’s going to be down to them.”
“And if something unforeseen happens? Something that needs a very human mind to analyze? No. One of us has to remain alive. And that’s you. If we can’t free the Raiel, you’re the one who can evacuate survivors to Aqueous. You. Not me, and not these two boys. We’re the ground troops. Let us do our job, and buy the ANAdroids enough time.”
“My combat experience…” Paula began.
“This is the whole world at stake here, Paula. I can’t save it. But I can help you save it.”
Paula took a breath and nodded reluctantly. “Very well.” She let go of the rope ladder.
“Good choice,” Marek said, and grabbed the ice-speckled ladder himself. He started to climb up.
“Same goes for you,” Kysandra told Ry and Florian. “There’s not much you can do.”
“Oh, please,” Ry said. “There are seven atom bombs heading this way. Every one we eliminate increases our odds of getting a wormhole working.”
“I’m coming,” Florian said. “No arguing.”
Marek reached the gondola. The plyplastic door opened for him. He slung his pack in and sat down in the front seat. His u-shadow linked to the Discovery’s smartnet and began the preflight activation sequence.
As the other three took their seats, he began pumping helium back into the gas cells. When he looked through the big curving windscreen in front of him, he could see Paula releasing the anchors. Once she’d retracted the malmetal spikes, the cables wound back into the blimp’s nose. The Discovery rose quickly, its fans spinning up to hold them steady. Then Marek directed the smartnet to take them north.
“They’re still spreading the bombs wide,” Paula said through the link.
A display from the ge-eagles showed how the Faller-seibears were moving. More than a hundred of the massive creatures were ranged in a ragged east–west line, heading south at about twenty kilometers an hour. They even saw that three of the giant humanoid-Fallers had survived the explosion and were riding on the seibears. They were wrapped in what looked like several layers of blankets, and carried their pump-action bazookas. The turbulent air from the bomb blast was dying away, and the low-level clouds breaking up, which allowed the ge-eagles to detect still more seibears joining the main pack.
Marek ordered a couple of ge-eagles to glide in closer, from the south. He directed one to the cluster of five seibears gathered around a bomb. Two of the seibears were also carrying the bazooka weapons. Another had something that resembled a small artillery gun; relative size made it a rifle for the creature.
“Crud,” Kysandra grumbled.
“Your force fields will withstand those weapons,” Paula said. “For all their size, they are just chemical-based.”
“Paula’s right,” Florian said a shade too eagerly. “Your integral force field deflected the bazooka strike back in Opole easily enough.”
“So it did,” Kysandra said drily.
“And our maser rifles have a much longer range. We can sniper a whole group and destroy their bomb before they know what’s happening.”
“Nice theory,” Kysandra said.
As the Discovery headed north, they watched as the seibears continued to spread out. Each bomb had a guard of about fifteen seibears, with three or four clustered protectively around the one carrying the warhead. The others took up a perimeter formation, with some scouting up to three kilometers ahead.
“That’s not going to make it easy,” Kysandra said.
The Discovery was flying northeast now. They’d decided to form a picket line in response to the continually widening pattern the advancing seibears were adopting.
“Looks like they’re going to try and surround the Viscount,” Paula suggested when the seibears were stretched out over a front twenty kilometers wide and still expanding. “Come at us from all directions at once. It’s a reasonable tactic.”
“Yeah, and it’ll be tough to intercept every warhead,” Kysandra agreed.
She was first out of the Discovery, forty kilometers north of the Viscount, where the snow and ice had built into rugged mounds with slabs of ice sticking through, making the going difficult.
It was farther from Viscount than Florian would have liked. But because the plan to intercept the seibears meant Discovery probably wouldn’t be around to collect them all again afterward, they had to be practical about the distance they could travel back by themselves. They also had to have a safe distance to protect the Viscount in case the Fallers managed to detonate one of the bombs during the interception. The others all seemed satisfied with the forty-kilometer limit.
Florian stared at Kysandra through the window as the Discovery started to fly west, a tiny gray figure trudging purposefully up the steep incline, casting a long shadow across the snow as the low sun sank ever closer to the horizon. Four ge-eagles spiraled above her, and two more were heading in from the south to help watch for the approaching seibears. Leaving her behind was triggering all kinds of feelings. Shamefully, the strongest one was fright. Mostly for himself. I’m next.