Starfall Page 5

  "There haven't been too many casualties yet," Pella said. "Anyhow we don't think so. Some collateral stuff—where dams have come down, for instance. And the smart plague has hit monorails and flitters and orbital shuttles; you have stuff just falling out of the sky, crashes everywhere."

  "They're disabling us rather than killing us," Stillich said.

  "Looks that way," growled the Admiral. "So they got in through stealth. I should have listened to you about that damn comet, Captain. You must be sick of being told you were right."

  Stillich shook his head. "It's not important, Admiral. What scares me is what else we have missed. That's been the trouble through this whole exercise. None of us can imagine—"

  Pella held her hand up, her hand at her ear. "Wait. There's another of their messages coming through." She touched her data desk. The same booming male voice, with its flat Alphan accent, sounded out. " ... free citizens of Alpha system and the inhabited stars have no quarrel with the people of Sol system, but with your government. We mean this final strike to be a demonstration of our capability. Please take all precautions necessary, especially along the North Atlantic seaboard. The free citizens of Alpha system ... "

  Pella looked at Stillich nervously. "What 'final strike'?"

  There was a burst of light in the west, like a sudden dawn. Again everybody flinched. The light seemed to draw down the sky, too bright for Stillich to look at directly.

  "Call a flitter," he snapped at Pella.

  'Sir—"

  “Do it! Get us out of here. And find a way to get a warning to the Empress in New York."

  AD 4820

  S-Day plus 3

  Sol system

  They hung a huge Virtual globe of the Earth in the lifedome of the Freestar, Flood's flagship. The crew watched the disaster unfold, mouths slack in awe.

  The Atlantic impactor had been the biggest single chunk of the comet, but it had been as precisely targeted as the rest. It had come down in the middle of the ocean, on a ridge of continental-crust formation about a thousand kilometres south of a small island called Iceland.

  From viewpoints on the ground, a particle of light was seen to descend from the sky, touching the water, and then, behind a wall of boiling cloud, a pencil of light shot vertically to the sky.

  From space, as rings of cloud expanded, a fireball blossomed, clinging to the carcass of the planet like a boil. The cloud rings merged to become a solid torus, centred on the fireball, and then more clouds formed at higher level. A shock wave spread out through the cloud layer, a reflection of a ring of waves spreading out across the ocean, a water ripple dragging a wall of cloud with it.

  The ripple in the ocean emerged into clear air. It was barely visible by the time it approached the land, at Newfoundland to the west and Ireland to the east. But it mounted quickly as it hit the shallowing bottoms of the continental shelves, water forced up into a heap, a wave with the volume and vigour to smash its way onto the land. All around the basin of the North Atlantic the steel-grey of the ocean overwhelmed the greenish grey of the land, the complexities of coastal topography shaping the water's thrusts. As the Alphans watched, the continents changed shape.

  Beya was Flood's eldest daughter. At twenty-five years old she had become one of his most capable officers. She watched the repeated diorama in shock. "I heard garbled reports. In some of those lands around the rim of the ocean, before the wave came, they said there was salt in the rain. You know, when I heard that, I didn't know what 'rain' was, exactly. J had to look it up." She laughed. "Isn't that strange?"

  "This is a demonstration," Flood said grimly. "The people of Earth know that far larger impactors have battered the planet in the past, causing vast pulses of death, even extinction. This will show them that we want victory, not destruction—but we hold destruction in our hands. This will work on their imaginations."

  "Well, it's working on mine," Beya said. "Dad, I never saw an ocean before. A moon-full of liquid water, just sitting there without a dome! Earth is alive, you can see it, not some lump of rock. And now we've hurt it."

  "We were never going to be able to loosen the eight-hundred-year grip of the Shiras without being strong."

  "But they will never forgive us for this," Beya said.

  "It's necessary, believe me." He reached for her shoulder, then thought better of it. "Any news of the Second Wave, the comet crew?"

  "Nothing was left of the comet, it seems."

  "Maybe the imperial military got to it. That's one ship I'm glad I wasn't on, I must say." He glanced over, to see the Virtual Earth running through its cycle of trauma once again. "Shut that thing down," he called. "Look, we broke through their outer perimeter without a single loss. In twelve hours we make perihelion, closest approach to the sun. We've all got work to do. Tomorrow, it's Sol himself!"

  AD 4820

  S-Day plus 4

  Solar orbit

  The Thoth habitat was a compact sculpture of electric blue threads, a wormhole Interface surrounded by firefly lights. The surface of the sun, barely twenty thousand kilometres below the habitat, was a floor across the universe. Thoth was over nine hundred years old. And all his long life it had been home to Sunchild Folyon, leader of the little community which maintained Thoth, a legacy from the past, held in trust for the future.

  But now the rebel fleet was approaching its perihelion, its closest approach to the sun—and Thoth's most significant hour since its construction by Michael Poole was almost upon it.

  After prayers that morning Folyon went straight to the habitat's bridge, where, even through the prayer hours, shifts of sunchildren maintained watch over Thoth's systems and position. The mood on the bridge was tense, for the wormhole into the heart of the sun had been shut down for twenty-four hours already, a time unprecedented in Folyon's memory; maintenance downtimes were usually measured in minutes.

  But this was an extraordinary moment which required extraordinary measures, as the Empress Shira had patiently explained to Folyon himself—and as he himself had had to relay to a reluctant Lieserl, deep in the belly of the sun. This was total war. Even Thoth had been infected by the smart plague. Every resource available to the empire had to be dedicated to the fight—and that included even Thoth and its ancient community. So Thoth's orbit had been carefully lifted from equatorial to a higher-inclination plane where the habitat was expected to lie in the path of the invasion fleet; and so the wormhole had, for now, been shut down.

  The sunchildren had fulfilled their duties to the letter. But Folyon, conditioned since childhood to dedicate his life to a single goal, had found it hard to accept this distortion of his deepest imperatives.

  Not wishing to exacerbate the crew's difficulty with his own qualms, he left the bridge and made for the observation deck. As so often, he dealt with his troubles by immersing them in the healing light of the sun, giver of life.

  The sun was a flat, semi-infinite landscape, encrusted by granules each large enough to swallow the Earth, and with the chromosphere—the thousand-kilometre-thick outer atmosphere—a thin haze above it all. The sunscape crawled beneath the habitat slowly, but that slowness was an artefact of scale, a collision of human senses with the sheer bulk of the sun. In this free orbit around the sun Thoth was actually travelling at five hundred kilometres a second. Folyon knew how privileged he was to spend his life in the orbit of the mighty star, the physical and philosophical core of human culture. At the prayer hours he would look away from the sun's processed light to the distant stars, and he imagined every human eye, even across interstellar distances, turned to the sun, towards him.

  And he wondered how many of those observers even knew of the habitat's existence, or its purpose.

  Deep below the habitat, tracking its orbit, the tetrahedral Interface of a wormhole, linked to the mouth tended by Thoth, was suspended in the body of the sun. Searing-hot gas poured into its four triangular faces, so that the Interface was surrounded by a sculpture of inflowing gas, a flower carved dynamically from
the sun's flesh. In normal times this solar material would spew from the wormhole mouth cradled by Thoth, to dissipate harmlessly. Thus the wormhole was nothing less than a crude refrigeration mechanism, by which solar heat was pumped away from the fragile human-built construct that housed the soul of Lieserl, and enabled her to survive in the sun's fire. And it was all for a higher goal. Lieserl was a monitor, sent into the sun to investigate a complex, dark-matter canker that seemed to be building up at the star's heart.

  Thoth's purpose outdated even the ancient empire of the Shiras, but, designated as a temple to Sol, it had always been maintained faithfully by the Empresses' lieutenants. Now Lieserl's wormhole was to be used as a weapon of war—but even this remarkable incident, Folyon knew, was but an episode in the greater history of Thoth and Lieserl.

  A sunchild touched his arm, a young woman. His thoughts, as so often, had drifted away from the here and now. Sunchild Mura said, "The time is close, sun-brother."

  "All goes well on the bridge?" He felt anxious.

  Mura was empathetic for a girl of her age and she knew his moods. "Everything is fine. You would only distract them all, forgive me for saying so, sun-brother."

  He sighed. "And so we go to war."

  "They tell me you can see it from here. The fleet." She scanned around the sky—every photon passed by the observation deck blister was heavily processed—and pointed to a cluster of starlike points, far away above the sunscape. "There they are."

  The lights grew in size and spread apart a little; Folyon saw now that they were splinters, like matchsticks, each with blazing fire at one end. "An enemy fleet from Alpha Centauri, come all the way to the sun. How remarkable."

  Mura counted. "Five, six, seven, eight—all accounted for. And their GUT drives are firing./I This was celestial mechanics, Folyon knew; if you entered the solar system from outside perihelion was energetically the most advantageous place to dump excess velocity. "They will come close; the projections of their trajectories are good," Mura said, sounding tense. "And they will come on us quickly. The moment of closest approach will be brief. But the systems are automated—the reopening of the wormhole won't rely on human responses." She hesitated. "Did you tell Lieserl what is happening today?"

  "I thought it was my duty," he murmured. "She will remember all this, after all, long after the rest of us are dust. I wonder if they are praying."

  "Who?" Mura asked.

  "The crews of those ships. For they worship Sol too, do they not? And now we are about to use Sol itself to kill them." He lifted his face, and his old skin felt fragile in the sun's processed light. "Do we have the right to do this? Does even Shira?"

  She grabbed his arm. "Too late now—"

  The ships exploded out of the distance. And at closest approach solar gases hosed from the drifting wormhole Interface, turning it into a second, miniature sun. Solar fire swept over the invaders. Mura whooped and punched the air. Folyon was shocked and troubled.

  AD 4820

  S-Day plus 4

  Oort Cloud, outer Sol system

  Densel Bel wished he could see the sun, with his naked eye. After all, he was among the comets now, within the sun's domain.

  He stood in the dark, peering up at the zenith, the way the ship was flying; he tried to imagine he was rising in some spindly, superfast elevator. A light-week out from Sol, with the ship travelling at less than two per cent below lightspeed, the view from the lightdome of the Fist Two was extraordinary. All was darkness around the rim of the hemispherical lifedome. The only starlight came from a circular patch of light directly over his head, crowded with brilliant stars, all of them apparently as bright as Venus or Sirius seen from Earth. He knew the science well enough; the starfield he saw was an artefact of the ship's huge velocity, which funnelled all the light from across the sky into a cone that poured down over his head, even from stars directly behind the ship as it flew.

  And meanwhile the stars he was able to see were not the few thousand visible in solar space by the naked human eye. His extraordinary speed had imposed a Doppler effect; the stars behind had been redshifted to darkness, while the 'visible' stars ahead, including the sun, had similarly been blueshifted to obscurity. But conversely red stars, giants and dwarfs pregnant with infra-red, now glowed brightly, crowding the sky, a hundred thousand of them, it was thought, crammed into that tight disc.

  Sol itself was somewhere in there, at the dead centre of his visual field, and he knew that the navigators on the bridge had elaborate routines to disentangle the relativistic effects from the starfield. But a primitive part of him longed just to see the sunlight again, with his own unaided eyes, for the first time in so many decades—

  Snow sparkled over the lifedome, gone in an instant. He flinched, half-expecting the blister to crack and crumple over him. He called, "What was that?"

  A Virtual of Flood appeared in the air before him, the avatar // used by the ship's AI to communicate with the crew. "We lost Fist One," Flood said bluntly.

  "How?"

  "A dust grain got it. The earthworms. They blew up an ice asteroid in our path, creating a screen of dust hundreds of kilometres wide. We have defences, of course, but not against motes that size, and at such densities. At our velocity even a sand grain will hit with the kinetic energy of a—"

  "There shouldn't be any asteroids here. We're out of the plane of the ecliptic."

  "Evidently the earthworms have prepared defences."

  "So how come we survived?"

  "The destruction of One blew a hole in the debris cloud. We sailed through."

  Densel considered. "So if we follow each other, even if the lead ship is taken out by further screens, it might clear a path for the rest."

  "That's right. We will still achieve our objective if only three, two, even just one of the Fists gets through." Flood hesitated, and the image crumbled slightly, a sign of additional processing power being applied. "There is other news. The Third Wave ships came under fire when they rounded the sun. Two were lost."

  "That was smart by the earthworms." Densel wondered if he ought to be exulting at this victory, for Earth, after all, was his home planet. But his heart was on Footprint, with the families he would never see again. He didn't want anybody to die, he realised.

  Flood said, "Smart, yes. But six ships survive, of eight. Meanwhile the earthworms are regrouping. Half of their ships, twelve of them, are heading for Jupiter." Flood nodded. "We have to eliminate the Navy, to win. Then that is where the decisive encounter will come, for the Third Wave."

  "And the other earthworm ships?"

  "Converging on the course of the Fists."

  Densel nodded. "But now, in Two, I'm in the van. The next in line for the duck shoot."

  Again that hesitation, that fragility. "The crews are conferring. That would not be optimal."

  "Optimal?"

  "The line is to be reconfigured. Fist Two will continue astern of the remaining ships, not in the lead, protected by the others."

  "You want to give Two the best chance. Why?"

  "Because Two has you aboard." The avatar grinned, an imperfectly imaged, eerie sight. "I told you. You are useful, Densel Bel." Theatrically it consulted a wristwatch. "Subjectively you are little more than a day away from Sol. Thirty-three hours, that's all it will be for you. Then it will be done. Try to get some sleep." It crumbled to pixels and disappeared.

  AD 4820

  S-Day plus 6

  Imperial bunker. New York

  Admiral Kale was shocked by what he found of New York.

  The great wave had spared some of the mighty old buildings, which stood like menhirs, windows shattered, their flanks stained by salt water. But the human city at their feet was devastated, scoured out, millennia of history washed away. Even now the aid workers and their bots dug into the reefs of rubble the wave had left, and the refugees were only beginning to filter back to what remained of their homes.

  But in her bunker of Construction Material, deep beneath the ruin o
f Central Park, the Empress sat beside her pool of logic and light, imperturbable.

  "You are angry, Admiral Kale," she said softly.

  "Every damn place I go on the planet I'm angry," he said. "The destruction of history—the harm done to so many people."

  "We are not yet defeated?"

  The tone of the question surprised him. "No, ma'am, we are not. We are massing the Navy cruisers at Jupiter—"

  "I have viewed the briefings," she said.

  "Ma'am." He stood and waited.

  "I have brought you here, Admiral, to speak not of the present but of the past, and of the future. You spoke of history. What do you know of history, though? What do you know of the origin of the empire you serve—and, deeper than that, the dynasty of the Shiras?"

  He was puzzled and impatient. Surely he had better things to do than listen to this. But she was the Empress, and he had no choice but to stand and take it. "Ma'am? I'm a soldier, not a scholar."

  "I need you to understand, you see," she rasped. "I need someone to bear the truth into the future. For I fear I may not survive this war—at least I may not retain my throne. And a determination that has spanned centuries will be lost."

  "Ma'am, we're confident that—"

  "Tell me what you know."

  Hesitantly, dredging at his memory, he spoke of the Emergency nine hundred years before.

  The great engineer Michael Poole had opened up Sol system with his wormhole projects, and worked on the first generations of interstellar craft. But Poole had greater ambitions in mind. He used wormhole technology to establish a time tunnel: a bridge across fifteen hundred years, a great experiment, a way to explore the future. But Poole's bridge reached an unexpected shore. The incident that followed the opening of the wormhole was confused, chaotic, difficult to disentangle. It was a war—brief, spectacular, like no battle fought in Sol system before. It was an invasion from a remote future, an age when Sol system would be occupied by an alien power.