As soon as Anala passed over the south pole, she knew something was wrong. She’d been hoping she’d be in time to see the Pericato launch its Aseri missiles; all the calculations showed it would get within range as she was approaching. Instead she saw the atmospheric anomaly—a big swirling cloud mass eclipsing the coast, roughly circular in shape and rising so much higher than any natural formation. Winds were tearing its edges apart, flinging out long tattered streamers.
She clung to the handholds beside the port, staring numbly at the chaos raging ahead and below. “Ry? Do you copy, Ry?”
“I’m here.”
“Thank crud. What’s happened? Did Danny fire the missiles?”
“He got one away. Anala, the Pericato was overrun by Faller-seibears. No survivors. We think it sank afterward.”
“No survivors?” she whispered.
“No. Please tell flight com they carried out their duties to the very end.”
“Did they get the Sziu?” She was practically shouting now, demanding reassurance.
“Negative. The Sziu was flung ashore. The Fallers have recovered the bombs.”
“Oh, great crudding Uracus! Where are they? Where are the bombs?”
“The Fallers are bringing them to us.”
“Giu! What are you doing? Can you get away?”
“The Viscount is too valuable to abandon.”
“Ry, no!”
“We’re going to stop them.”
“How can you do that?”
“Head-to-head. Don’t worry; we have the Warrior Angel and her weapons.”
“You can’t go out there, Ry. You can’t!”
“I’m sworn to protect Bienvenido. And even if I wasn’t a regiment officer, I’d still be doing this. Paula has a plan. She can save us all if she just has the chance.”
“No. Please—”
“I’ll be fine. Tell flight com what’s happened. You can reenter and splash down now. Thank you for what you did.”
“Ry?”
“See you on the other side of the sky, Anala.”
The farther the seibears ventured into Lukarticar’s interior, the more punishing the frigid landscape became. Snow slopes rose higher, ice outcrops were harder and sharper, the crevices deeper and narrower—sometimes covered with a slim treacherous bridge of compacted snow, concealing them from sight. The Faller-seibears never knew they were there until their own weight collapsed them, sending them tumbling onto the terrible ice blades underneath.
Even losing several of their number didn’t bother them. They continued to advance inexorably as the sun fell below the horizon, plunging the continent into acute darkness. Night didn’t slow them, either. They must have been equipped with eyesight comparable to a human Advancer.
Once the pack was fifty kilometers inland, no more came to join them, leaving their numbers at just over a hundred. They were spread out across a front thirty-five kilometers long, with the flanks beginning to move ahead of the center.
It was a long wait. Florian had been dropped off after Kysandra, nine kilometers to the west of her, with Ry a farther eleven beyond him. After that it was just Marek on board. The ANAdroid had spent his time rigging one of the maser rifles inside the gondola before jumping out.
Five ge-eagles were assigned to Florian. He kept them circling overhead, two of them barely a hundred meters above the snow so nothing was left to chance. He didn’t want a Faller sneaking up on him unexpectedly from the south.
Discovery had dropped him in a zone that had snowdrifts cresting up to thirty meters. The valleys between them were scattered with ice outcrops protruding out of the crisp snow—from irregular lumps the size of boulders up to giant ridges that could’ve been costal cliffs, they were so tall and jagged. Florian was also extremely wary about crevices, using a multisensor pack built into his e-m suit to sweep ahead, watching for the treacherous frail roofs that had so far claimed four Faller-seibears.
He found a good position on top of a snow ridge, which gave him a clear line of sight for a good five kilometers. Behind him, the downslope was clean—no ice, no hidden fissures—and the valley floor beyond was relatively clear. Once he’d struck, he could make a fast escape.
So he pushed the snow into shape like a kid building castles on the beach and lay in the grooves he’d scooped out, wiggling to get comfortable. As always, the miraculous e-m suit kept him a cozy warm; its fabric had now flowed over all the skin on his face, forming a full mask with a transparent band over his eyes. He was perfectly protected from the cold. And with his force field skeleton already active at low level, he was protected from any physical impact or energy blast.
He settled down for the long wait. Not that he could see much; the night out on the exposed snowfield was as deep as it had been in the dead starship. But he had all his amplified sensors, as well as those of the ge-eagles.
The seibear pack’s location was constantly being updated by the ge-eagles tracking it from above. During daylight, they’d flown inside the thin bands of cloud ribbing the sky. Now, with the long night engulfing Lukarticar, they’d dropped down to a kilometer above the massive creatures and continued to gather excellent imagery. They remained invisible even at that altitude, though Paula and the ANAdroids suspected the Fallers could see them with infrared sight—if they had any.
If they did, they must be able to make out the Discovery. Marek had been remote-piloting it ever since he abandoned it. The blimp had flown a wide circular course, initially heading southwest, then curving around the seibears’ western flank and approaching them from behind. Marek was steering it for the group in the center of the line. As it caught up with the cantering seibears, so Marek increased its speed, redlining the fans.
The group of seibears guarding the bomb began to close up when Discovery was four kilometers behind them. Then two of them peeled off and headed back toward it.
“Now we get to see what kind of firepower they have,” Marek said.
When the seibears were still two kilometers away, he reduced Discovery’s altitude to eight hundred meters and opened a meter-wide hole in the transparent plyplastic of the front windscreen. The maser rifle fired, pulsing twice in under a second. The two seibears dropped down dead.
“That was easy,” Paula said.
Discovery slid forward. One of the ge-eagles showed a seibear carrying one of the giant rifles, leveling the weapon at the airship. It began to fire repeatedly, the muzzle plumes temporarily overloading the enhanced infrared image. More data slipped across Florian’s exovision. Whatever the huge gun was, it had enough range to hit the Discovery. The blimp was juddering badly from each hit. Eight gas cells reported losing pressure. Then one of the rounds hit a fan. Discovery’s smartnet was reporting critical damage.
Through the glare of the muzzle fire, the ge-eagles could just make out the seibears dispersing, scurrying for cover behind thick jumbles of ice outcrops. Two of them hunkered down deep in a fissure, lying on top of the bulky crate that contained the bomb.
Another round hit the gondola, and the link vanished. A ge-eagle tracked the Discovery sinking out of the night sky, its envelope deflating as it went, until it was just a mass of flaccid fabric twirling around and around. It hit the snowfield with a gentle bump. The wind blew it along slowly to the northeast until it caught on a snag of ice.
“They all stopped,” Paula said. “There was quite a bit of link traffic between the bomb groups.”
“Can the drone jam it?” Kysandra asked.
“Yes. Their traffic architecture is very crude; my countermeasures routine can easily tailor specific blockers. I’ll bring the drone up and close down their communications. If they can’t coordinate and don’t know what’s happening to one another, it should help.”
Jamming the seibear links certainly had an effect. The groups that had all halted simultaneously suddenly didn’t seem to know what to do next. Two of them—the ones Florian and Marek were provisionally assigned to intercept—started off again at once. This time, they redeployed their sentries so there were always a couple trailing by several kilometers, alert for any more attacks from the rear.
During the long wait, Florian tried temporarily deactivating his enhanced senses and exovision, certain his excellent natural vision would be able to make out a couple of meters of the snowfield around him; after all, he’d done a lot of nighttime work back in Albina Valley. But this was different. This was a total absence of light. He held his hand up in front of his face, and some primeval part of his brain couldn’t accept that the hand was invisible. It scared him badly, and secondary routines hurriedly brought back his enriched vision.
Uracus, the Fallers must be able to see in infrared. There was no other explanation for them knowing the Discovery was closing on them, not in this darkness.
The longer he watched the seibears advancing, the more isolated he began to feel. He wanted them to come within range so this would all be over, yet some shameful part wanted to flee, to hide from the monsters in the all-engulfing darkness.
He concentrated on tracking the group bringing the bomb he was supposed to take out. Treat the whole thing as a mental exercise, he told himself, which should allow him to take his mind off the physical reality of his situation.
After half an hour, it was obvious his group were on a track that would take them east of his current position, so he got up and started walking again. The plyplastic skis were in his backpack along with the harness, a spare power cell, and his food—everything he’d need to get back to the Viscount afterward. But despite the memory skill implant, he still wasn’t confident enough to start skiing.
An hour later he was atop a hundred-meter ice cliff with the wind whistling up the hard surface to buffet him. Right along the top, the snow was sculpted in strange curving shapes that twisted upward two or three times his own height, like clashing waves solidified in mid-impact. The cavities and hollows provided perfect cover. If the seibear group kept to their current track, they would have to pass along the bottom of the cliff. He could stay hidden inside a snow cleft, shielding his infrared emission until the ge-eagles showed him they were all within range.
He spent another ten minutes scouting along the edge until he found the perfect place—one with a low gully leading away from the cliff that he could retreat along if things went bad. With that settled, he went inside one of the short cavities and began another wait.
Marek watched through the ge-eagles as the seibear group trotted over the rough snow toward him. He’d taken cover halfway up a vast rock crag that was only partially cloaked in snow. The snowfield that splayed out from its base was a broken wilderness of shattered ice boulders and dangerous crevices.
“Our optimal strike time will be seventeen minutes—mark,” Paula told everyone over the general link. “You should all be able to open fire within eight minutes of one another. Ry, you’re going to be the last.”
“I can move forward,” Ry said.
“No. Their scouts might see you. Let’s keep this as simple as possible. Once the attack has started, I’ll use the drone as a kinetic weapon and take out the bomb to the east of Marek. That’ll leave the two bombs on the flanks.”
It was good logic, Marek agreed. The flank bombs were now the farthest from the Viscount, so they would take the longest to reach the starship. That gave him and Kysandra a reasonable chance of intercepting them while Ry and Florian retreated to Viscount. His old Nigel personality approved. The boys had no experience in combat. Equipping them with maser rifles and molecular severance cannons for sniper duty was as close as they could get to guaranteed success, whereas he and Kysandra had a much better chance of taking out the remaining nukes.
His retinas spotted the scouts four minutes later, when they were still two kilometers away. The main group of five seibears clustered around the nuke was another two and a half kilometers behind them. One of the scouts was going to pass within four hundred meters of him.
Marek stopped breathing. The warm breath wafting through the polar air might just be a giveaway. His body had enough oxygen reserves to last for an easy half an hour.
The scout lumbered onward, never breaking stride, its big head turning from side to side with mechanical regularity—and every three turns it would check the sky, too. Marek was impressed. Faller biology allowed the enormous seibear body to perform at the peak of biochemical limits. That kind of power and efficiency was a match for his own.
“I’m red—ready,” Marek announced when the bomb was only fifteen hundred meters away. The scouts had passed by on both sides without slowing; even so, a ge-eagle was marking them. The remaining outriders formed a loose circle around the primary group.
“Me, too,” Kysandra announced.
“Another three minutes,” Florian said.
“The scouts of my group are passing me now,” Ry said. “It’s taking longer than I expected. The terrain here is rough.”
“Marek, Kysandra, initiate now,” Paula said. “I’m launching the drone.”
Marek spun around the rock that was concealing him. The maser rifle’s target image filled his exovision, shunting the ge-eagle links to peripheral mode. He fired at the seibear carrying the atom bomb and saw all its muscles go limp, sending the big body sprawling onto the ground, plowing up shards of ice. To his dismay the dead seibear tilted as it came to rest, putting the mass of its body between Marek and the crate with the bomb.
“That’s not good,” Marek murmured. He’d taken out the carrier first to immobilize the bomb, allowing him to shoot it with the molecular severance cannon—an unhurried accurate shot at a stationary target. Now the bomb would be protected by the vast bulk of the creature’s flesh.
“Trouble?” Demitri asked.
“Only for them.” Marek shot another seibear, one being ridden by a giant humanoid-Faller. The two of them went tumbling into the ice barbs.
Another three fast shots and he finished off the primary group. The ge-eagles showed him the humanoid-Faller jumping up from behind a clutter of rocks. The bazooka fired and the Faller was immediately pumping the mechanism, firing again. Marek got off a shot—too quick for a decent aim, and anyway the Faller was diving for cover. He did the same thing just as the first bazooka round slammed into rock fifteen meters away. It couldn’t harm him, not with his force field skeleton, but the blast did punch him backward. The force field flickered a spectral turquoise as debris slammed into it. Marek stayed down.
The second bazooka exploded, farther away than the first. Through the ge-eagle’s feed, he saw the giant Faller pick up the bomb crate and start running at impressive speed. All seven seibear outriders were now charging toward the crag.
“Having some trouble there?” Demitri asked.
Marek ignored his brother’s taunt, standing up and taking careful aim at the fleeing humanoid. Only it vanished from the target feed. Genuine incomprehension flashed through his thoughts—a puzzlement reflected in the minds of his batch brothers. At any other time, that would have been really quite satisfying.
He sent the closest ge-eagle diving down to the Faller’s last position and began jogging toward it. A seibear scout cleared the side of the crag, sprinting at a phenomenal sixty kilometers an hour. Marek spun and fired the maser rifle, completing the spin and running forward again in less than a second. The seibear collapsed, its momentum sending its mighty body careering onward for another twenty meters.
An image from the ge-eagle leapt into his exovision as it streaked over the jagged expanse of rock and ice. It had found the giant humanoid-Faller. “The Faller’s faller—fallen,” Marek said. “Down a crevasse.”
The ge-eagle circled tightly. It showed a slim fissure bridged with a layer of ice, which had shattered the instant the giant had stepped onto it. His infrared signature was a bright glow, fifteen meters down, wedged between the narrowing rock faces. Warm trickles of fluid ran down the fissure walls. The crate, leaking radiation, was a couple of meters from him.
“That’s not good,” Marek said. He started to speed up.
“Don’t you fall down,” Valeri warned.
“I no—know.” Marek directed another ge-eagle around, sending it skimming along the route he was taking, scanning the ground ahead for any snags or hidden fractures.
“Got mine,” Kysandra announced. “Masered the bomb. It’s dead. Clearing up now.”
Two more seibear scouts raced into range. Marek slowed and shot both of them. One was carrying a pump-action bazooka. The beam must have hit the magazine. It exploded, flooding the area with garish orange light. Flames leapt upward for several seconds, plunging the abysmal terrain into sharp relief. Shadows swung around as the fireball rushed upward, then dimmed and vanished. Marek sprinted onward.
“Engaging now,” Florian said. “They’re almost directly beneath me. Oh, yeah! Got the bomb carrier!”
“Well done,” Kysandra said. “Just stay calm and shoot the bomb next, then pick the survivors off.”
“I know. I know.”
“I’m sending the drone down now,” Paula said.
Marek was halfway to the crevice with the Faller-giant, his concentration divided between making sure every footfall landed on secure ground and the image relayed from the ge-eagle. “Uh-oh. It moved. I thunk it’s still alive.”
“Can you get to it?” Demitri asked.
“Yes.”
“In time?”
Marek didn’t answer. The Faller-giant was wiggling about energetically now, trying to get free of the rock’s grip. A large amount of its blood was running down the fissure. Every motion sent another gout squirting out of the wound where the rock had punctured its waist. “It’ll kill kill itself doing that.”
“It has no choice,” Fergus said. “If it gets to the bomb…”
A flash of light zipped across the eastern horizon, as white and fast as distant lightning.
“Drone strike confirmed,” Paula said. “On target. Ge-eagles reporting radioactive debris in the air. The bomb was vaporized.”
Marek was four hundred meters from the crevice now. He had to slow to take out another seibear. That left six closing in.
Down in the crevice, the giant Faller wrenched itself free of the impaling rock and flopped sideways. Its fist smashed the hefty crate open.
Marek sprinted. The ge-eagle had mapped out a safe track. His bioconstruct brain kept him aligned perfectly. He hit fifty kph, zinging with exhilaration and fear, bringing the maser rifle around, ready to hurdle the crevice and shoot straight down. Beam switched to full power, wide angle.
The Faller tore shards of wood aside and reached for the control panel underneath.
“Fucking fuck it,” Marek snarled.
Florian was shooting the eleventh seibear of his target group when the nuke went off. Marek was about thirty kilometers to the west, but the light was so intense it felt like ten meters. Fortunately he hadn’t been looking in that direction.
Crudding Uracus!
The transparent strip over his eyes had a cutout level, automatically preventing dangerous light levels from reaching the retina. Even so, all he could see was a white glare; it even overwhelmed the exovision icons. He shut his eyelids fast. The only difference that made was turning the light from white to a pale pink. He slapped a hand across his head, and finally the glare reduced.
His skeleton suit was reporting a huge radiation surge. The force field had been pushed close to its limit blocking the initial gamma flash, but it was holding.
Feeds from most of the ge-eagles had dropped out. His own multisensor module was reporting a huge electromagnetic pulse. The relay back to the Viscount was intact, running through five ge-eagles.
“That was not an Operation Reclaim bomb,” Paula said. “That was a full Liberty bomb, around the three-hundred-kiloton mark. You all need to shield yourself from the blast wave. Move! I’m bringing the ge-eagles down. We’ll relink as soon as it’s safe.”
The light level was reducing slightly. Florian looked down at the dazzle-white snowfield below the cliff, his targeting graphics picking out the surviving seibears. He was sure two of them had been blinded by the flash; they seemed to be stumbling. The others were standing still, taken completely by surprise. Then he realized the glare haze shimmering off the snow was actually fluorescing fog. For as far as he could see, snow was boiling, throwing off a blanket layer of seething mist that was expanding upward rapidly.
He turned and ran through the gully that was his ready escape route. Two ge-eagles plunged down out of the clear pearl-white sky, one racing on ahead, surveying the meandering passage, the other keeping pace three meters above his head.
“You have control,” Paula said. Then her link dropped out.
“Kysandra?” Florian sent.
“Here, babe,” Kysandra said. “I hope you’re doing what you’re told, and getting ready for the blast. It’ll hit you in about a minute.”
“Yeah. It’s difficult. I’m in this gully.”
“Crud! Get out of it! You’ll be crushed!”
“Trying.” Now that he was out of direct line of sight, the glare was almost tolerable. But steam was roaring overhead between the lips of the snow walls and churning down into the gully. It was hard to keep traction, and the dense steam was interfering with most sensors.
Florian slipped and scrambled around uselessly on the steam-slicked ice trying to regain his footing. Then he stopped, realizing it was much better to go with it. He held his body rigid and began to pick up speed. He slid down the slope like the world’s smallest bobsled, totally dependent on the force field to protect him if there was any rock sticking up through the melting ice.
“Ry?” he asked.
“Present and correct.”
“You okay?”
“Alive, and working to carry on with that.”
“See you later?”
“Deal.”
“Hey, did you get your bomb?”
“Of course.”
Florian’s laugh had the taint of hysteria. He was going alarmingly fast now, and water was starting to sluice along with him. Corners sent him slithering up the walls before gravity pulled him down.
Abruptly he shot out of the gully and began spinning around. There was nothing to see. The steam was too dense and turbulent, its own jets and microcurrents strong enough to buffet him.
Then the blast hit and the ground slammed up into him. He cartwheeled through the cloud. Steaming lumps of snow flew around him and then he was down again, hitting hard. The force field tightened around him, cushioning the blow. Exovision graphics told him the force field was also deflecting the sound waves that were ripping the snow apart. As he kept skidding along, the crazy slushy ground vibrated under him like an abused trampoline.
The steam layer was suddenly ripped away by the shock wave. He almost wished it hadn’t been. The twisting spires of wind-fashioned snow were disintegrating, breaking apart into a tide of looser snow that was starting to flow like a viscous liquid. It churned around him, pummeling the force field. Overhead, the incredible atomic light was burning down to incandescent red-gold, filling the heaving air with dusky oil-rainbows as it fluoresced the hail of water particles.
“Avalanche!” Florian screamed. He had no idea who he was trying to warn.
The mush he was caught on began to move faster and faster, spitting out chunks that arched through the air in every direction. It started to build up around him, sliding over his frantic scrabbling limbs.
Think!
There were waves forming in the mush cascade now, building into horrifying crescents. About to collapse downward in lethal torrents.
He ordered the force field to expand. It left him in the middle of an invisible bubble that elevated him from the unstable flood. But still the waves built around him, growing in violence as the blast energy poured into them, sending them writhing at contrasting angles and differing speeds. They smashed together, whirled apart, peaked, fell away—he was slammed about violently, utterly helpless, a football kicked by elemental gods.
Then the biggest wave of all rose up, darkening his world. The force field bubble rotated him upside down. He looked up past his feet and saw the wave break in a strangely elegant fantail of solid scarlet spume that crashed down upon him.
Florian didn’t think he lost consciousness entirely, but there was certainly a long moment of utter disorientation. The mush kept shoving him along, though the motion soon became sluggish and stopped.
He hung suspended inside the force field bubble, body inclined at a seventy-degree angle, head down. True consciousness was the realization that he was dangerously nauseous. His u-shadow ordered the skeleton suit to release him from suspension, but to maintain the perimeter.
Squatting on the floor, he fumbled through his backpack and pulled out a torch. That wasn’t as reassuring as he wanted. He was at the bottom of a perfect sphere three meters in diameter, completely buried in snow. No way of telling how deep.
But those avalanche waves were high. Seven, eight meters at least. And more has flowed over since.
He used his u-shadow to expand the force field. It grew by about twenty centimeters, then stopped. The pressure the snow exerted was now equal to the energy it took to maintain the force field. It wasn’t going to get any bigger, so it definitely wasn’t going to expand until it burst through the surface.
“Crud.”
Florian had thought the dose of claustrophobia he’d suffered in the starship was bad. This threatened to be infinitely worse.
His heart started doing its flutter thing, and he sucked down air in fast shallow gulps.
Oh, just crudding great!
Then he stopped panicking about being confined because an oxygen warning flipped up in his exovision. Not only was the oxygen level of the air shrinking, the carbon dioxide was rising.
“No! No, no, no!”
He used his secondary routines to calm his breathing. His u-shadow ran a fast analysis. With the e-m suit filters operating at maximum efficiency, he had enough air left for approximately thirty minutes. That helped the secondary routines pacify his racing heartbeat a little.
He stared upward, furious with the universe for doing this to him. “I just survived a crudding atom bomb,” he yelled. Stopped. Calmed again. Wasting oxygen. “Come on. Think, Uracus damn you. You’re supposed to be smart, a true nerd. Science your way out of this.”
He glanced up again at the stubborn snow pressing down against the force field. “Ah.” The u-shadow changed the force field’s shape, turning it to a teardrop, with a very pointed apex. It drove upward a good twenty centimeters.
“Crud!”
He shone the torch into his rucksack. Nothing in there he could punch upward with. The maser rifle and molecular severance cannon were still with him, hanging on their shoulder straps. He really didn’t fancy trying the molecular severance cannon on the ice, not at zero range.
He put the rifle muzzle up into the small apex, and his u-shadow reformatted the force field to allow the slim tube through. With the rifle muzzle pressed directly into the snow, he fired a half-power burst. The tube rammed itself back down, and a shower of boiling water squirted through the gap in the force field before it managed to close. The e-m suit deflected the scalding heat easily.
“Crudding bollocks!”
Okay, reformat the force field to let the maser energy through, but no physical gap this time.
Once the u-shadow complied, he fired through the weakened zone. The snow above him turned to water, which began to seep down the curve of the sphere. There were bubbles fizzing away inside it.
He blinked in fascination at the slow-motion cascade. It’s like black beer.
But it continued to flow around the curving force field wall until the bulk of snow chilled it to slush and it began refreezing. Directly above his head, there was a small cavity.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
With a giddy laugh, he fired the maser rifle again, slowly spiraling the beam around. Outside the force field, the quantity of vigorous bubbling liquid reached epic proportions. A deluge of boiling water flowed around and down to drain into the snow around the base, where it slowly refroze. His u-shadow ordered the force field apex to extend, and it slid up ten centimeters before reaching solid snow again.
“Right you bastard,” Florian declared grimly. He changed the angle of the maser, and fired again.
Twenty-two minutes later, a patch of dark appeared above the boiling water.
Sky! Crudding sky!
The force field shrank back until it was a flexible layer above his e-m suit. He clawed his way out of the hole and lay on his back, staring up into the strange sky. The wind was ferocious, sending clouds streaking past. But above them, borealis storms raged through the tenuous upper atmosphere as the radiation impact from the explosion slowly dissipated across the ionosphere. Ghostly green and crimson waves, already covering half of Lukarticar, spun and slithered around one another, casting ephemeral-colored shadows across the diseased simmering snowfield.
Florian smiled up at the astonishing display in blissful gratitude. Fighting his way out of that mess certainly deserved some cosmic recognition. It didn’t come finer than this.
His u-shadow sent out a link ping.
“Florian?” Kysandra sent. “You’re alive!”
“Yeah. Little trouble for a moment there. But I’m okay now.”
Communications icons appeared in his exovision. Eighteen ge-eagles were active and in the air. Flying in the fast winds was difficult, draining their power reserves, but they could stay airborne for another couple of days.
“Hey, Ry, you made it,” Florian exclaimed, studying the communications icons.
“Of course.”
“I had a mountain fall on me,” Florian said proudly.
“Rock or snow?”
“Snow.”
“Ha, you had it easy.”
Florian chuckled as he studied the communications display. “Why aren’t we linking with the Viscount?”
“I don’t know,” Kysandra said. “But that was a monster bomb blast. I’m assuming the shock wave collapsed the tunnel down to HGT54b.”
“Yeah.” Florian nodded slowly, trying to convince himself. “That’ll be it.” If it collapsed the tunnel, what did it do to the Viscount’s structure?
“Are you mobile?” she asked.
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“Good. Grab yourself a pair of ge-eagles and get going. We’ll see you back at the Viscount.”
Uracus, no peace for the wicked. “Okay. I’m on it.”
“And Florian?”
“Yes?”
“Watch out for Faller-seibears. If we can survive, they sure as Uracus can.”
Ironically, the journey back to the Viscount was always the part Florian had worried the most about. Now—less so.
He took his time activating the skis, watching the bulbs of plyplastic expand into two-meter-long strips. As they did that, he struggled into the harness. The wind made it difficult, constantly pummeling him with loose ice chips. In the end he had to reconfigure the force field into a sphere again—which the wind shoved about ferociously. By the time he was ready, two ge-eagles had arrived, with a third on its way.
Florian hitched the huge semi-organic birds to the harness. When they were secure, he hunched down on the skis, giving himself a low center of gravity and reducing wind resistance, and prayed his skill implant memory was up to the task. The ge-eagles took off, and began towing him.
He was fifty kilometers from the Viscount. When they’d planned how to get back, no one had figured for the winds. Paula had estimated the ge-eagles could pull them along at about thirty to thirty-five kilometers an hour, but the severe aftermath of what the Liberty bomb had inflicted on the local atmosphere was producing winds that whipped around seemingly at random. Their direction was constantly in flux, as was their speed. Florian even experienced interludes when they dropped away completely, but there weren’t many of them.
After the first ten kilometers, when his leg muscles were starting to hurt badly from the constant crouching, the temperature began to plummet again, allowing the fervent clouds to condense. Snow began to fall, only to be whipped into a brutal high-velocity deluge by the winds. Florian had to stiffen the force field to deflect their impact. Visibility shrank to a few meters. He was reliant on the sensor images the ge-eagles were producing to avoid the smaller snags and fissures. The ge-eagles themselves steered him away from larger obstacles. All he had to do was hang on and keep his balance.
The roar of the icequake reverberated like boulders cascading down a rocky mountainside. Inside the cramped confines of HGT54b, it was deafening, but Paula ignored it. She was too busy hanging on to the grid as the compartment shook. Hairline cracks appeared in the pressure bulkheads. Gridwork segments snapped, allowing several heavy cargo packs to shift alarmingly. The three ANAdroids formed a protective picket around the wormhole generator they were working on, gripping onto one another like an acrobat team. Their force fields expanded and merged.
It seemed to go on for a long time. Finally, when the noise abated and the compartment stilled, Paula released her hold on the grid. She wasn’t sure, but the angle seemed to have shifted, becoming more acute.
“That was fifty kilometers away,” Demitri said. “If they detonate another one closer, we’re dead.”
“I would have expected the ice to absorb more of the compression wave,” Valeri said.
“It probably pulverized the ice in its wake,” Fergus said. “Another explosion might produce a reduced seismic force.”
“Let’s try not to find out,” Valeri said. “Did any of them survive that?”
“Marek certainly didn’t,” Demitri said. “He was only two hundred meters from the epicenter. The force field suit was not built to withstand a direct three-hundred-kiloton blast.”
“I’m sorry,” Paula said.
“Don’t be. We are machines.”
“Maybe. But I have to concede you’re doing a pretty good imitation of human.”
“Marek would appreciate that sentiment. He was confident he was becoming human.”
Paula nodded. Exovision displays showed her not a lot. All external links were down. She ordered the plyplastic door to open. When it did, it revealed a wall of compacted snow. “Damn, the tunnel has collapsed.”
“Kysandra at least may be alive,” Valeri said. “She has an integral force field, and was far enough away.”
Paula eyed the wormhole generator. It was half dissembled. Replacement components, cannibalized from two others, had been laid out neatly around it. Now they were scattered everywhere; she could see several sticking out of the water pooling at the bottom of HGT54b. “Worst-case scenario, both flank bombs survived. We have three hours until the seibears arrive.”
“Best-case scenario, actually,” Demitri corrected. “If they come ten kilometers closer and detonate, the icequake will finish us.”
“But they don’t know that,” Paula told him, “so let’s work on the assumption that we have three hours.” She pointed at the wormhole. “It has to be operational by then.”
“Understood.”
Something prevented her from asking them if that was feasible. The collapsed tunnel was a problem, though. A molecular disruptor pulse was out of the question down here. There was nowhere for the superheated gas blast to escape. She poked at the snow, which wasn’t too hard-packed. Several handfuls came out when she scooped at it. She picked up her maser rifle and reduced the power to 5 percent before firing it at the snow just above the bottom rim of the door.
It melted immediately. Several liters of hot water soaked into the snow below, gradually refreezing. She fired again, melting more. After twenty minutes she’d succeeded in melting out a cavity big enough to stand up in. The humidity in the air was becoming tropical.
Standing on the creaking ice of the cavity base, she altered the rifle output again, reducing the beam width to a centimeter and shunting the power up to 50 percent. Then she aimed it vertically upward and fired. A small jet of steam rushed downward. Without her force field, she would have been scalded; as it was, it played across her face, spoiling her view. A fieldscan function allowed her to keep her aim straight.
The maser took nineteen minutes to bore a five-centimeter hole up to the surface. With an open route for the steam to vent, she closed the plyplastic door and increased the beam width, then started to widen the hole.
After an hour and a half, the hectic winds were starting to subside—not that it made the going any easier. True, the ski skill implant memories meant Florian had only lost his balance a couple of times, but he knew he was going to be hooked up to the farmhouse medical capsule for a week to treat his leg muscles. He was having to stop every twenty minutes just to spend a minute to stretch and recover. He didn’t dare allow himself any longer.
In those ninety minutes, the ge-eagles had managed to pull him thirty-five kilometers. More ge-eagles had survived the blast wave to rise from their ground shelter and link in. They now had twenty-two, of which nine were on tow duty. Kysandra deployed eight as link relays, giving her five to search for the bomb the east-flank seibears had been carrying.
They finally located it through the gunk clogging the turbulent atmosphere, homing in on the spray of its signature radiation. Eleven Faller-seibears were still alive, and carrying the bomb toward the Viscount at their usual prodigious pace.
That was the second piece of bad news. The ge-eagle at the end of the link was flying repeated sweeps over the Viscount’s location, and there was no sign of Paula and the ANAdroids. No tunnel entrance. No activity. It could detect the huge starship still buried below the ice, but that was all.
As Florian set off again, the ge-eagle sensed a thin plume of steam spurting up out of the ground. He actually cheered. The image from the ge-eagle played front and center of his exovision, banishing the discomfort of the journey.
All three of them watched the feed as the ge-eagles towed them toward it, seeing the steam increase until it was a full-scale fountain. Then it ended, and infrared revealed a glowing hole in the snow. The ge-eagle glided overhead.
“Hello,” Paula said.
“What happened?” Kysandra asked.
“An icequake broke the tunnel, but everything else is fine. What happened to you?”
“One bomb survived. It’s twenty-eight kilometers out from Viscount and closing. Do you want me to intercept?”
“No, we can’t risk another detonation. Our timetable has become perfectly defined: We either activate the wormhole generator or this venture is over—probably along with our lives.”
“Understood,” Kysandra said. “I’m about seventeen minutes out.”
Florian gritted his teeth when he thought about how much longer he’d be spending on the skis. He couldn’t help but thinking of that oh-so-long night spent in the Sandy-J with Lukan chattering away in the driver’s seat as the dark countryside flashed past. At the time he’d been twisted up with worry. Now he knew just how easy that night had been.
The ge-eagles powered on indomitably through the night, their wide wings illuminated with the freakish swirls of the celestial ghostlight bombarding the ionosphere. It portrayed their movements in juddery snapshots, as if they were clockwork-mechanical instead of the smooth perfect-future technology of the Commonwealth. The temperature was still dropping from the heat peak provoked by the bomb flash, the gentle snow sharpening to ice flakes, making him thankful for his force field as they assailed him.
“How long?” he asked.
“How long for what?” Paula said.
“Until the wormhole generator is operational?”
“We’re hoping to power up in an hour,” Demitri replied.
Florian gritted his teeth. An hour was about how long it was going to take him to reach the Viscount. “Understood. I’ll be there for that.”
“Ry?” Paula asked. “How’s your progress?”
“With you in forty minutes.”
“Good.”
Paula stood behind the ANAdroids, watching patiently as they slotted components into place. They were moving with methodical precision, as if this were a complex ballet they’d rehearsed a thousand times. She said nothing, not wanting to interrupt. If they had doubts, they would share them—after all, the actual Nigel would—but they’d given her a timetable. Only some unexpected event would change that now.
Her low-level fieldscan revealed someone slithering down the newly melted tunnel. The plyplastic door opened, and Kysandra stepped into HGT54b, glancing around at the dislodged cargo.
“Crud! You got knocked about, didn’t you?”
“The wormhole generator didn’t suffer any damage,” Paula replied. “That’s all that matters.”
The hood of Kysandra’s e-m suit retracted. “Sure.” She ran her gloved hand back through her long hair. “So what are you going to take with us?”
“Everything in HGT54b. Once we get everything working again, it will provide us with a decent manufacturing base.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Even if a machine doesn’t work, it’ll be a good source of spare parts until we begin manufacturing new systems.”
“Of course. So is the wormhole going to be accurate enough to drop us outside the farmhouse?”
“We’re not going to the farmhouse,” Paula said.
“What?”
“I have been considering options. We not only need to buy time, we also need to safeguard Port Chana. Neither of those things will happen if we go back to the farmhouse.”
“Why not?”
“Our original plan didn’t account for the Fallers acquiring nukes. Now we know they have them and are more than willing to use them, so we have to circumvent them.”
“By not going home?”
“Exactly. They have clearly infiltrated the government to at least the same degree that your friends have. I saw Roxwolf’s connections, and that was a rejected Faller in an outlying city. So we can’t risk opening negotiations with Adolphus, because they’ll find out. If they even have a hint of where we might be, they’ll detonate a bomb there. And everyone knows Port Chana is the center of Eliter resistance to the government. They will blow it off the face of the planet.”
Kysandra gave her an unenthusiastic nod. “Okay, so we don’t go to the farmhouse. Where then?”
“A place where we can activate all the Commonwealth machines without panicking the Fallers into launching their Apocalypse. A place where we will never be spotted, even by accident.”
“So?” Kysandra demanded. “Where?”
“Macule.”
“You’ve got to be crudding kidding me! Macule is a radioactive desert.”
“Not relevant. Commonwealth technology can protect us from a little radiation. And as soon as we’re up and running, we can feed local minerals into the refineries to build the sensor satellites that’ll analyze the Valatare barrier. That’s not possible on Aqueous, which is the only H-congruous world. All its minerals are at the bottom of the ocean.”
“Giu! You’re really not kidding, are you?”
“That’s not my strongest trait, no.”
Kysandra glanced down the tilted compartment at the ANAdroids. “I suppose you lot agree?”
“It’s logical,” Demitri said without turning around. “Paula knows what she’s doing.”
Kysandra’s arms went up in surrender. “Bollocks. Macule it is.”
Ry arrived next. He grinned in delight when Kysandra explained Paula’s change of plan. “My astronaut corps friends are going to be so envious. I will be the first of us to set foot on another world.”
“First of many if this works,” Paula said.
They tracked Florian’s progress as the ANAdroids finished reassembling the wormhole generator. He was still eleven minutes out when Demitri announced: “Ready to power up.”
“Do we wait for him?” Ry inquired.
“No,” Paula said.
They all gripped the gridwork and stared down at the big circular machine. Paula knew her nerves couldn’t be written off entirely as teenage hormones. So much depended on this—250-year-old biological machines using someone else’s memories to repair machines more than three millennia old. The fate of a world. Nobody had ever thrown the dice so high in human history.
Well…maybe Ozzie.
That conjured up a secretive smile as Demitri initiated the power-up sequence.
Everyone held their breath. The wormhole generator emitted the tiniest humming noise.
“Mass converter online and functional,” Demitri said. “We have power.”
Paula was struck by just how much like Nigel he sounded. She hadn’t noticed before.
“Bringing the gateway up to full activation readiness.”
Paula’s nerves were overtaken by excitement. She’d gone through tens of thousands of wormholes in her enormous previous lifetime—so many it was utterly mundane. This, though…This reminded her of just how extraordinary the whole concept was. Warping the very fabric of the universe for human convenience.
“Force field on,” Valeri said. “We are shielded.”
In front of her, the blank circular face of the wormhole generator began to flicker with hazy turquoise phantasms, slivers that hovered on the edge of existence.
“Initiating spacetime compression,” Demitri announced.
The phantom streaks merged together, forming a circle of elusive indigo radiance. It was impossible for the human eye to focus on the phenomenon; the light was shifting, extending back into infinity at the same time as it remained in place.
“Is that it?” an awed Kysandra asked. “A wormhole?”
“No. What you’re seeing is Cherenkov radiation,” Fergus said. “The start of a wormhole. This is a wormhole.”
As he spoke, the eerie light vanished, draining back in a single disorienting lurch. Paula instinctively increased her grip on the gridwork, fighting the impression she was moving. The last sparkle of Cherenkov luminescence at the center of the wormhole vanished and a ripple of blackness spread out.
Ry turned to her, his face appealing silently.
“Yes,” she told him. “It’s a hole through space.”
“We’re opening the terminus five hundred kilometers above Lukarticar,” Demitri said. “Systems stable.”
A bright white line slowly slipped across the open wormhole—the terminator, cutting Lukarticar in half. Long serpentine strands of the aurora undulated majestically across the night side, vanishing into daylight.
“You’re now looking down on yourself from a great height,” Demitri said with a small smile. “And in case you think that’s seriously weird, if we had time to play I could open the terminus directly behind you. That way you can look at the back of your own head. Trust me, that really messes with human perception. Let you in on a secret: That’s what we did the very first time Ozzie and I fired up our machine. We didn’t actually extend the terminus to Mars until a couple of hours later, after we’d checked out our designation coordinate software. There’s a lot of factors to manipulate simultaneously. We had to hack time on the college supercomputer to—”
“Enough,” Paula snapped. “Is it fully functional?”
“Yes.”
“Please shift the terminus to Macule.”
Florian could barely move off the skis. Both legs were an agony of cramps. An exovision map showed him the surviving seibears carrying the last bomb, their icon perilously close to his.
The icequake and storm wave had changed the shape of the snowfield above the Viscount, so that he could have been anywhere. But five meters away, two pairs of skis identical to his had been stuck vertically into the puckered surface, and already fresh snow had accumulated low cones around them. He half waddled to the hole in the snow they were standing sentry over. The shifting borealis light showed him the way. As he shuffled forward, rumpled snow beneath his feet turned from emerald to rose-pink then shaded down to blue as deep as a twilight ocean. The hole remained a constant black, its sides crusted with ice.
I’m supposed to clamber down that?
Resentment was burning hot in his mind. Resentment that no one had come up to greet him, to help him. Surely Kysandra would have…
“I’m here,” he told them through the general link.
“Get down here fast,” Kysandra responded immediately.
“How?” He didn’t mean to ask. It was weak, he knew. But after everything he’d been through, would it have killed her to show just the tiniest degree of sympathy?
“Just jump,” Paula said. “Use your force field to cushion your landing.”
Florian stood on the rim, rocking in the wind. The hole seemed to grow, its darkness intensifying. And he’d had enough of being in black spaces beneath the snow tonight. Another thirty minutes and it would be dawn.
Like that’s going to help.
“Hey,” Kysandra said. “I’m waiting for you, Florian. The wormhole is working. Please. Take a leap of faith.”
He jumped.
The ride was awful; every ripple in the ice seemed to catch him, and the juddering never stopped. He couldn’t move his arms—they were pinned to his sides—and the claustrophobia was vicious. He was terrified he was going to wind up jammed in the hole just like the Faller-giant.
Then his feet cleared the bottom of the shaft and the force field flared out. He landed hard, and his mistreated legs gave way.
Arms closed around him, helping him to his feet—which was painful. Waves of red hair swished across his face. His e-m suit helmet retracted and the red hair was tickling his skin. Through the jumble of tresses, he saw a mouth open wide in a smile, then a kiss.
“Welcome back,” she murmured contentedly into his ear.
Then he was stumbling through the plyplastic door into HGT54b. He stopped in shock, a half smile of wonder on his face. He was looking into a circle of daylight that shone across the interior. It was advancing slowly down the compartment, and the cargo pods and crates were passing through it, then tumbling away to the side, landing in a jumbled pile on a gray desert that went on forever.
“That’s not the farmhouse,” he said numbly.
“No,” she agreed. “It’s definitely not. E-m suit hood back on, and your force field. Let’s go.”
Then she took his hand, and led him into the light.
Anala came back over the south pole and stared down in mortification at the radiant mushroom cloud that was rising over Lukarticar. It straddled the terminator, casting a filthy orange radiance across the night side.
She hadn’t seen the first one go off a few hours back, but the angry storm it created was evidence enough—pitiless winds assaulting the massive curtain of thick warm cloud. A mighty atmospheric battle illuminated by the cold delicate light of the aurora, as if an iridescent sea were rushing across the bottom of the world.
“Ry,” she’d called into the microphone. “Come in, Ry.” A dozen times she called, a hundred, repeated on each subsequent orbit.
Now this new atrocity had darkened the aurora, and once more the ground was smothered with belligerent, agitated clouds.
“Ry, are you there? Are you alive? Anyone? Can anyone down there hear me?”
There was no answer. Not on that orbit, or any of the seven that followed.
After that, she obediently followed flight com’s instructions and fired the main service module rockets, braking her speed below orbital velocity. The command module began its long reentry plunge down through the atmosphere.
“Ry?”