Judas Unchained

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

All the trees in the forest were identical, elegantly rotund, and rich with red-gold leaves that reminded Ozzie of New England in the fall. This, though, was high summer, with a bright sun high overhead, and warm dry air gusting through the branches. Ozzie had stripped down to his T-shirt and a pair of badly worn shorts; not that it stopped him sweating hard from the effort of carrying his pack. Orion was wearing cutoff pants and no shirt; his expression martyred as he lumbered on in the grinding heat of the afternoon. Tochee seemed unaffected, its colorful fronds flapping loosely as it slid along.

Ozzie was pretty sure he knew where they were, though his newfound pathsense wasn’t quite as precise as a satnav function. He’d started to pick up on a few signs in the last half hour. This path was now quite neat, the kind of track that you’d get when someone took care of it, rather than just a route that people and animals walked at random. There were no dead branches lying across the way, and remarkably few twigs. Several boggy puddles had been filled with gravel so travelers didn’t have to detour. Then he even saw where branches had been cut on trees close to the path; they were long healed over now, just knobbly warts in the sepia bark. All the things a government land management agency would do to keep the path open for walkers.

His insert functions were slowly coming back on-line, which gave him a very positive feeling as he strode onward. Ever since they’d left the gas halo, his bioneural arrays and inserts had reverted to the usual erratic basic operational ability that characterized the Silfen paths. The day after they’d talked with Clouddancer he’d picked up a path right in the middle of the forest that cloaked the reef. That was four worlds ago. It wasn’t that Ozzie knew where to go; rather he could now sense where the paths would take him. Several times he’d started off down one only to turn around and discard it, searching for another, one that would take him closer to the Commonwealth. There was no mental map, more a simple awareness of direction.

The graphics in his virtual vision were strengthening with every step forward. Processing power increased in tandem. Signal strength between his inserts and his handheld array rose dramatically. Then the array detected another signal.

“This is it,” Ozzie yelled out. He started to run forward.

“What is?” Orion asked. “We left the end of the path a while back.”

The forest began to thin out, revealing a rolling landscape of gray-green meadows. Alien bovine animals with six fat legs and an amber hide were grazing indolently. Sheep mingled among them, unperturbed by their strange stablemates. He saw hexagonal metal troughs filled with hay. Long lines of wire fencing divided the land up into huge pasture fields. Beyond them were some crop fields, their green wheat shoots just on the cusp of ripening. Hills rose up in the distance, mottled with the gold-brown shading of extensive forests.

Ozzie’s inserts interfaced with the planetary cybersphere. Achingly familiar unisphere icons popped up into his virtual vision. The shock of seeing them again after so long was like an ice shower. I’m home. He turned to his companions who were just emerging from the small wood without any sense of urgency. “We did it,” he yelled. His legs gave way and he sank to his knees. A wicked vision of early papal visits to the worlds he and Nigel first opened filled his mind. He bent down and kissed the ground. “We fucking did it,” he yelled up at the blazing sun.

“Did what?” Orion asked curiously.

“We made it, man.” Ozzie struggled to his feet and hugged the startled boy. “Look around you, man. Don’t you see it? Sheep, fences, farmland, I think that’s a load of barns over there. We’re home, we’re back in the good old Intersolar Commonwealth.”

Orion gazed around curiously, a tentative smile on his freckled face. “Where?”

“Er, ah, good question. Hang on.” His virtual hands danced over icons, pulling information out of local systems. “Bilma. That’s in phase two space. Haven’t visited before, and it’s out of range of my wormhole. Never mind. We’re on the Dolon continent, other side of the planet from the capital. Nearest town Eansor, population twenty-two thousand. Seventy-two kilometers”—he spun on his heel, a huge smile on his face, and shot an arm out, pointing over the hilly land—“that way. And there’s a road three point four kilometers”—he turned again—“there.”

“Friend Ozzie, friend Orion, I am delighted you have completed your journey.”

“Hey, man”—Ozzie laid an arm over Tochee’s back—“my house is yours. And I’ll apologize in advance for people making a fuss over you and generally behaving badly. You’re going to be quite a celebrity. The ambassador for your whole race.”

“I believe the translation routine has made an error there, but I thank you for the caution. What do you propose doing now you are home?”

“Good question. One: a bath! Two: decent food. Maybe switch that around.” He took another long look around the bland farming landscape they’d emerged into. One thing really bothered him with the unisphere icons: the date. According to the display, he’d been away from the Commonwealth for over three years, whereas in his personal timescale he’d been walking the Silfen paths for eighteen months. “Okay. I need some time to check up on what’s happening. According to Clouddancer we’re in the middle of a war. We also need to organize some transport, especially for Tochee. So let’s see.” He began to pull information out of the unisphere, as slowly as any beginner who was just getting to grips with inserts and virtual vision for the first time. A list of local vehicle hire companies materialized. He ran down their inventories, and settled on a Land Rover Aventine, which had enough room to take Tochee if ten of the fourteen seats were folded down. He paid for it, and loaded instructions into the big four-by-four’s drive array. “Let’s head for the road, guys. Our car’ll be here in fifteen minutes.”

“Ozzie,” Orion asked cautiously.

“Yep?”

“This town, Eansor, has it got, like bars and such in it?”

“Of course, man.” He’d just pulled the town’s commercial register out of the unisphere to find the best hotel.

“So, tonight”—Orion squinted up at the sun, which was in the last quarter of the sky—“are we going to visit a few places, you know, social places, ones that have girls in them?”

“Oh, right, not a bad idea. We’ll definitely hit the town over the next few days, I promise.”

“That’s good. I’ve remembered all the pick-up lines you gave me.”

“You have?”

“Yeah, I still think I can pull off the heaven one.”

“The what one?”

“When you look at a girl’s collar and read the label back to her, and tell her—”

“She’s made in heaven. Ah. Right, I remember now. Sure. Look, man, those kinds of lines are strictly last resort, okay. Your big advantage is going to be telling them what we’ve been doing and what you’ve seen; no other kid can compete with that, you dig? You’re going to be the hottest brightest dude on the block. The chicks’ll need sunscreen just to stand near you.”

“Okay.”

“But first, you need a decent scrub and some flash clothes. We can sort that once we’re relaxing at the hotel.”

“I don’t understand why you need verbal trickery to ensnare a temporary mate,” Tochee said. “Are you not attracted to each other by what you are?”

Ozzie and Orion shared a glance.

“Our species tend to amplify things a little,” Ozzie said. “No harm in that.”

“You speak an untruth to potential mates?”

“No, no. It’s not that simple. This is like a ritual.”

“I believe the translation routine is insufficient once again.”

“Is Tochee going to come with us to the bars?” Orion asked.

Ozzie glared at him. “Probably best not.”

“I would like to see all aspects of human civilization. From what you have told me, it is richly textured and steeped in artistic culture.”

“Oh, brother,” Ozzie muttered.

They sat on the side of the road for ten minutes before the Land Rover Aventine pulled up in front of them. It was a dark metallic red four-by-four, with curving windows of mirrorglass along both sides. The broad malmetal door at the rear flowed apart, and Tochee wriggled itself into the back.

Ozzie sat up at the front, and loaded some new orders into the drive array. It was strange being in a technological artifact again. Even the smell surprised him, the pine-bleach cleaning fluid and polished leather scent of a vigorous valet service.

“This is fast,” Orion said as they set off.

“Uh huh.” They were doing under a hundred kilometers an hour. The road was just a simple strip of enzyme-bonded concrete, a minor route linking isolated rural communities. Same the Commonwealth over. “How old were you when your parents moved to Silvergalde?”

“Dunno. Two or three, I think.”

“So you don’t like remember much about the Commonwealth, then.”

“No. Just the stuff people brought to Lyddington. Not that much of it worked there.”

Since they left the Ice Citadel, Ozzie had conveniently forgotten the kind of parental responsibility he’d assumed when he allowed Orion to tag along. He was going to have to look out for the boy as much as he was Tochee. Both of them were excited by the car journey, asking questions about the farms and other vehicles they passed. It was like having a couple of five-year-olds to contend with.

When the road finally turned onto a two-lane highway that took them into the town and the Land Rover Aventine really built up some speed, Orion whooped like a roller coaster passenger. Tochee inquired if all human vehicles were so fast. Ozzie knew enough now about their big alien friend for its body language to tell him it was nervous. He limited the car to a hundred eighty kilometers an hour.

Eansor was a pleasant enough town, though hardly spectacular by anyone’s standards except those of Orion and Tochee, who were mesmerized by the buildings and roads and people. The highway wound through the industrial parks on the outskirts, over bridges in the suburbs where the best houses lined the river, and finally dipped into the gentle rumpled valley where the city center colonized the slopes with big stone and glass buildings.

Ozzie directed the Land Rover around the back of the Ledbetter Hotel and parked it in a delivery bay. “Wait here,” he told the others. “Seriously, guys. I need a quiet day to catch up. I don’t want to cause any scenes here, okay?”

“Okay,” Orion said amiably.

Just to be safe, Ozzie locked the Land Rover doors as he left.

The Ledbetter’s high-ceilinged lobby had an extensive central display of exotic alien vegetation, with the plants carefully graded so that as you walked through them their leaf colors progressed through the rainbow. Ozzie, who had endured enough wondrous alien vegetation along the paths to last his next five lives, walked straight from the revolving doors to the reception desk completely ignoring the lush surroundings. There were a lot of glances from the other patrons shooting his way, usually followed by a nose wrinkling in disapproval. That was why he just kept staring right ahead; he knew exactly what he looked like as his boots trod field dirt into the plush royal-blue carpet.

He reached the slate-topped reception counter, and slapped his hand down on the polished brass bell. Two largish assistants from the concierge desk were moving into place behind him. The duty receptionist, a man in his late thirties wearing the hotel’s gray blazer uniform, gave Ozzie a reproachful look. “Yes.” Pause. “Sir.”

Ozzie smiled from inside his extravagant beard. “Like, gimme the best suite you’ve got, man.”

“It’s booked. In fact, all our rooms are booked. Perhaps you should try another establishment.” He looked over at the two assistants, hand rising to beckon.

“No thanks, dude. This is the only five-star in town.” Before the receptionist could stop him, he reached over the counter and pressed his thumb against the i-pad on the hotel’s credit array.

“Listen, pal—” the receptionist began. Then blinked as the hotel system registered Ozzie’s bank tattoo and identity certificate. “Oh.” He swayed forward slightly, peering closely. “Ozzie? I mean, Mr. Isaac, sir. Welcome to the Ledbetter.”

The assistants froze. One of them actually smiled.

“About that suite?” Ozzie said.

“My mistake, sir, our penthouse suite is available. We’d be honored to have you stay here with us, sir.”

“Glad to hear it, man. Now, about this penthouse; I expect you get a lot of important people here, people who don’t want everything they do splashed on the gossip shows.”

“I believe you’ll find us most discreet, sir.”

“So far, so good. Is there a service elevator to the penthouse?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Even better. Now listen carefully. There’s a very large alien sitting in a car in one of your delivery bays out back. I want it into the service elevator and up into the suite without any fuss and without anyone seeing. I do not want to look out of my window tomorrow morning and see Alessandra Baron or any other media dudes camping outside.” He shunted a very large gratuity to the Ledbetter staff general account. “We cool on that?”

The receptionist’s eyebrow rose a fraction. “I will make your request quite plain to the other members of staff.”

“Good man. Now, do you guys have a decent room service menu?”

“We do indeed, sir. Our restaurant has the finest menu in town. Would you like to see it now?”

“No, just send the food up to the suite.”

“Yes, sir. Er, which items?”

“All of it.”

“All of it?”

“Yeah, and just to play safe: twenty-five lettuce as well.”

“At once, sir.”

The en-suite bathroom to the master bedroom featured a circular sunken marble pool, large enough for several people. But not quite big enough for Tochee. The alien lay on a bed of towels beside it, and scooped the warm soapy water over itself. Its manipulator flesh gripped two of the largest combs to be found in Eansor and raked them through its colorful fronds, pulling out the flecks of dried leaves, and grit, and mud spots, and grass stalks, and all the other detritus it had picked up in the feathery appendages as they moved between worlds.

Orion, wearing just a huge canary-yellow towel around his waist, was working around Tochee with the shower hose, washing off the foam that Ozzie had rubbed into its fronds after they’d been combed.

“We do not have ‘shampoo conditioner’ on my world,” Tochee told them. Several of his cleaned fronds quivered at the slightest movement; they were becoming dramatically soft and vibrant as the water dried away. “I would become very important if I were to introduce such a thing.”

“It’s the little things in life that count, man,” Ozzie said. Like Orion, he was wearing a big towel and nothing else. He’d probably have another shower once they were done with Tochee’s beauty therapy. Three in one day! The water washing down the drain in the first one had been vile.

They’d eaten after their all-important first wash with real soap, the three of them moving along the line of trolleys laden with the restaurant’s finest cooking. Ozzie had wolfed down the perfectly cooked French-blue steak. Sampled the fish, the game, the risotto, the sweet and sour chicken, the Thai spice dishes, the pasta. Fries! A whole mountain of them. Beer, drunk as if it had been passed down from Mount Olympus.

Tochee had stuck to the vegetable dishes. How anybody, alien or not, could eat two bowls of raw carrot sticks intended for the dips was beyond Ozzie. The lettuce had been a good idea, too; Tochee ate half of them.

Orion and Tochee both tried ice cream for the first time ever. Finished every spoonful on the trolleys, and sent out for more. Ozzie munched his way through the other puddings, taking a couple of spoons from each.

After the bacchanal meal, they’d brought in clothing store staff from the city, with big cases of the latest fashions. It had taken an hour to choose a wardrobe for both of them. The hotel’s in-house salon sorted out Ozzie’s beard, and gave him a proper manicure. He wouldn’t let them cut much off his Afro; he kind of liked it so explosive. Orion got a similar treatment. It only ended when Ozzie politely rescued the poor girl who was styling the boy’s hair.

“You were drooling,” he told Orion when the flustered girl had left.

“She was beautiful,” Orion protested. “And really friendly.”

“Oh, man, she was sixty years older than you. Trust me on that, rejuvenation is easy to see if you know what you’re looking for; she wore that much makeup because she’s not actually very pretty; and she was being professionally courteous, not friendly.”

“You’re just jealous.”

Ozzie promptly canceled the massage he’d booked for both of them.

Sprucing up Tochee took a good ninety minutes. But Ozzie had to admit, it was time well spent. Once they’d finished blowing the hair dryers over its fronds, their friend looked magnificent. Fluffier than they’d ever seen it, but wonderfully colorful. “A whole Vegas chorus line worth of costumes in one package,” Ozzie declared.

“Are we going out now?” Orion asked. He’d put on a semiorganic black shirt, wearing a white and scarlet jacket over the top; the pants were green enough to hurt the naked eye. It was an ensemble fashionable with the under twenties, the store assistant had promised. Ozzie felt really old just looking at the boy; no way was he going to walk into a bar with anyone dressed like that.

“Sorry, not tonight. I told you I had some serious datawork to catch up with.” The hotel, indeed Bilma itself, was just an interlude before he got back to his asteroid and thought out what to do next.

“Tomorrow then,” Orion said in a whiny voice. “Promise me tomorrow. It’s not fair we get back and I have to stay in the whole time. I want to meet some girls.”

“All right, tomorrow,” Ozzie said, anything to divert the boy.

“So what do I do tonight?” Orion asked. It was already dark outside, with ground lights ringing the hotel shining green and red through the windows.

“Access something. I’ll show you how. Tochee might like to see something of the Commonwealth as well.” He ushered them into the suite’s main lounge, and accessed the room management array. The big hologram portal lit up with a huge unisphere category menu. Ozzie hurriedly loaded in restrictions that would stop the boy wading through porn all night long—for Tochee’s sake, obviously—and switched the array to voice activation function. He slotted a direct translation routine in for Tochee, and left them to it.

***

The Guardians’ vehicles were almost down to the bottom of the deep inlet where Shackleton was situated when Adam’s narrowband link back to the train dropped out. He told Rosamund to send the drone back to inspect the gateway. Even as the little bot turned a sharp curve through Half Way’s clear red sky he was certain what it would find. Vic had been right. Judging by the silence in the armored car and the way everyone was keeping quiet on the general band, he wasn’t the only one with that thought.

The image in his virtual vision showed him the simple hoop of equipment that anchored the Half Way end of the wormhole. For a moment, it was illuminated by one of the powerful blue-white flashes in the sky. The stab of light revealed the interlocking machinery inside the arch. There was no wormhole.

“Well,” Morton said. “I’d say getting back is going to be a tad difficult now.”

“There are still planes at Shackleton,” Adam said, keeping positive. He didn’t want anyone to start panicking. Not yet, anyway. If they started thinking about how isolated they were, they’d lose it very quickly indeed. All he could think of was the one remaining wormhole on this godforsaken planet, and the fact that the Starflyer was going to reach it first. He had to admit, as traps went, this one was a beauty. All the Starflyer had to do was get through to Half Way and blow the generator behind it, leaving them stranded on a world with no link to anywhere, in an environment that would slowly kill them. And who would come looking? Sheldon might. Possibly.

Adam’s e-butler told him Bradley was calling on a private link. “This isn’t good. Did you ever examine this scenario?”

“Stig and I reviewed what would happen if the Starflyer blew the Port Evergreen wormhole generator as it returned. That was a year ago. We believed there would be sufficient resources on Far Away for the clans to complete the planet’s revenge. But that assumed they already had the Martian data, and we’d got more equipment through. The Far Away freight inspectorate division screwed that up for us, which is one of the reasons why we switched to the blockade run scenario.”

“But we expected to do that before the Starflyer’s return,” Bradley said.

“Exactly. Then the Prime attack threw another spanner in the works. And I certainly didn’t predict anything quite this personal.”

“So what are our options?”

“There’s only one: get to Port Evergreen before it.”

“And can we do that?”

“Even if it hasn’t sabotaged the planes, it has a thirty-minute head start. We don’t have aerobots. Or even air-to-air missiles.”

“I see,” Bradley said. “Is there any way we can call ahead, and reverse this trap on the Starflyer? Get our clan warriors through the wormhole at the other end, and secure Port Evergreen before the Starflyer arrives? That way it will be trapped between us.”

“The planes only have short-wave radio in case of emergency. There are no satellites here, only a seabed fiber-optic cable between Shackleton and Port Evergreen to link Far Away to the unisphere.”

“So someone stays behind and when the next cycle begins they send a message through to Stig.”

“The Institute is blocking all communications, has been for days.”

“Then we have no choice but to make the flight and hope Stig can help us out somehow.”

“Without knowing what’s going on?”

“He’s not stupid. He’ll know the Starflyer is returning, and that we’re on our way as well.”

“I hope you’re right.”

The vehicles arrived on the shelf of rock where the pressurized huts and vast hangars were laid out a hundred meters above the sea. Two of the hangar doors were open, the regular flashes from the planet’s odd double star revealing their empty cavernous interiors. When the drone made its early flyby, its active sensors revealed the remaining seven hangars each contained a Carbon Goose.

“Our vehicles will fit into one,” Adam announced.

“I don’t mean to intrude, but isn’t that a little too risky?” Bradley queried him. “All our eggs in one flying basket.”

“I’m prepared to run an inspection on the planes,” Adam replied. “We’ve been running with the possibility of sabotage by Starflyer agents, that’s why I brought the forensic sensorbots. There are enough to check over three planes. But we have to get airborne and fast. Putting all the sensorbots onto one plane will speed the whole process up. We can’t afford luxuries like three aircraft, Bradley, not any longer.”

“I apologize, Adam. This is your operation; I’ll try to keep my mouth shut for the rest of the journey.”

“Don’t. I can still make mistakes. If you see one coming, shout it long and loud.” Adam switched back to the general channel. “Kieran, Ayub, you have decontamination duty. I want it checked thoroughly; we don’t need any surprises over the middle of the ocean.” He made everyone else wait in the relative security of the vehicles while Kieran and Ayub went over to the Carbon Goose in the fifth hangar, which had been left in a minimal power hibernation mode. A swarm of standard forensic sensorbots wriggled over the rock with them, looking like arm-length caterpillars. The machines bristled with gossamer-thin smart-molecule filaments like a downy fur. They circled the gigantic aircraft, testing the rock for any sign that someone had been in the hangar recently.

“Nobody for well over a week,” Ayub reported. “Zero thermal disturbance. No residual chemical dissemination.”

Adam gave them the go-ahead to test the plane itself. Kieran went up to the cockpit and loaded a batch of diagnostic software into the avionics. Ayub supervised the sensorbots as they crawled over the fuselage and slithered in through the airlocks. They wriggled into the structure through inspection ports and grilles, probing every component casing with their filaments, sniffing the air for any trace chemicals, performing resonance scans on the structure. He dropped three into each of the nuclear turbines so they could squirm their way past the fan blades and work their way back through the compressor bands.

“When does the wormhole cycle begin?” Anna asked.

“In just over six hours,” Adam said. “Assuming the Starflyer has a standard flight, it’ll remain open for about an hour and a half after it arrives at Port Evergreen.”

“That just gives us enough time,” Wilson said. “But it’ll be tight.”

After twenty minutes, Ayub cleared the lower cargo hold, declaring it free of booby traps.

“How long does this take?” Oscar asked.

“As long as it needs to,” Adam said resolutely.

“We’re giving them too big a lead time,” Wilson said. “At this rate there’s no way the Starflyer will leave a working gateway at the other end by the time we get there. We have to keep hard on its tail if we’re to stand any kind of chance. You’ve got to run a minimum scan and take the risk.”

Adam knew he was right. If the Starflyer truly hadn’t wanted them to follow, it could easily have wrecked the remaining planes before it left. So either they’d been sabotaged, or it simply intended to destroy the Port Evergreen generator, leaving them trapped here. Simple is always most effective. And the Starflyer must be improvising to a degree as well. “Okay,” he told the drivers. “Load them up.”

Kieran and Ayub opened the main cargo deck ramps at the back of the Carbon Goose. The Volvos went up first. As the armored car drove under the wing, Adam saw sensorbots starting to fall out of the turbine exhausts to lie flexing uselessly on the sheer rock floor, their sophisticated electronics victim to the micropile’s radiation. He stayed focused on them for a long time as they slowed and finally became inert. It was a bad omen on a world inimical to humans when even the machinery designed to function here proved deadly to standard Commonwealth technology.

Wilson was still in his armor suit when he entered the cockpit. In keeping with the rest of the Carbon Goose, it was a big compartment with seats more like leather recliners than the cramped USAF fighter seats that he used to contend with in his first life. The windshield was a curving transparency six feet high that gave a panoramic view out over the blunt nose. Kieran was sitting in the pilot’s seat, still in his armor, with three high-performance arrays spread out on the control console. They were plugged into the plane’s avionics with thick fiber-optic cable.

“Did you find anything?” Wilson asked.

“No. The software checks out. I’ve loaded some additional monitors in case anything was submerged, but they didn’t really have the time to plant anything sophisticated. There’s no thermal trace of anyone here before us. My opinion for what it’s worth: this is clean.” He climbed out of the chair and unsealed his helmet.

Wilson studied the young face that was exposed. Short hair framing slim features, alert eyes; eager, dedicated, efficient. Me, three hundred forty years ago. God! “When I was in the air force, I learned to always trust my engineering crew. I don’t suppose anything’s really changed.”

Kieran broke into a genuine grateful smile. “Thank you.”

“Okay, let’s see if I actually remember how to fly.” He started to take his armor suit off.

“Admiral. I’m glad you’re here.”

The term surprised Wilson. Thirty hours ago, the navy that he was in charge of had been hunting down the Guardians as if they were a pandemic virus. It made the young man’s faith all the more touching. “I’ll do whatever I can,” he promised.

Oscar and Anna arrived in the cockpit as Wilson was pulling his feet out of the armor’s boots. He was only wearing a white T-shirt and shorts, and the cockpit’s air was almost freezing.

“Here you go,” Oscar said, and dropped a small bag at Wilson’s feet. “Our CST-issue executive travel pack. Essential for survival in hotels and conferences the Commonwealth over.”

“Don’t mock,” Wilson growled as he unzipped the bag. He found a fleece with a CST logo on the chest, and pulled it on quickly before sitting in the luxurious pilot’s seat. “Yow, this leather’s cold.” He put his hands over the console’s i-pads, and reviewed the menus rolling into his virtual vision as the interface was established. The first thing he did was locate the plane’s environmental circuits and switch the heating on full.

“Everybody in and secure,” Adam reported.

Anna was out of her armor suit, puffing against the cold as she pulled on some clothes from her CST pack.

“You want to take the copilot’s seat?” Wilson asked.

“Sure.” She gave him a quick intimate smile.

“We actually need to be in the air before you two can join the mile-high club,” Oscar told them dryly.

Wilson grinned. “This is the bit I’ve always wanted to say,” he confessed to them as the avionics confirmed the micropiles were ready. “Atomic turbines to power!”

Anna and Oscar exchanged a look. Oscar shrugged.

The turbines spun up, and Wilson released the wheel brakes. The Carbon Goose rolled out of its hangar and down toward the icy sea.

***

“Oh, brother,” Ozzie grunted. He was accessing files from his asteroid, seeing the refugees from Randtown come stumbling through the wormhole. “There goes the neighborhood.” Two hours into his review of everything that had happened, and he was beginning to wish he’d headed off in the other direction after leaving Island Two.

The last home file showed him Nigel wandering around the bungalow. Ozzie’s own recorded projection played out, and Nigel swore at the end of it. Back in the cozy warmth of the Ledbetter penthouse suite, sprawled on his circular, emperor-sized jellmattress, Ozzie grinned at his old friend’s dismayed expression. Poor old Nige had always disapproved of his lifestyle, the decisions and choices. It was their contrary opinions that made them such a good team.

He drained his tumbler of bourbon and told the maidbot to refill it, then moved on to examine records from the latest invasion. “Oh, brother.” The damage that the flare bombs and quantumbusters inflicted on the stars was terrifying. Then something terminated Hell’s Gateway, something that the Sheldon Dynasty had done independently from the navy, something greater than a quantumbuster. Half of the unisphere now comprised speculation and gossip about Nigel using that ultra-weapon against Dyson Alpha, winning the war in a single strike.

The other half of the unisphere was busy discussing the Second47’s evacuation into the future. Ozzie took another swig as the War Cabinet made their announcement. “Son of a bitch, don’t bring me into this,” he shouted at Nigel’s image. His so-called friend’s face loomed hugely over the bed, as projected by the portal on the opposite wall. It was badly focused now. Ozzie tried to do some math to see if Nigel knew what the fuck he was talking about, but the equations were impossible to form. He looked at his tumbler, which was empty again. “Just bring the bottle,” he told the maidbot.

Virtual hands wobbled through virtual vision, and he knocked politely on the SI’s icon.

The War Cabinet vanished to be replaced by tangerine and turquoise lines weaving through and around each other. “Hello, Ozzie. Welcome back.”

“Good to be back. I mean it. You’ve no idea how wonderful toilet paper is until it’s taken away from you by an unfeeling universe. I think it’s a defining characteristic of human civilization, the ability to manufacture something decent to wipe your ass on. Believe me, forest leaves just don’t cut it. Well, actually,” he sniggered, “they do, and that’s the problem. And you can make that my epitaph if you want.”

“Duly noted.”

“Hey hey, don’t you smartass me. You’ve got some bigtime explaining to do, man.” The maidbot rolled up to the side of the bed, and held out the bourbon bottle. Ozzie took it, and winked at the little machine.

“You are referring to the emergency Randtown evacuation,” the SI said.

“Nail on the fucking head, dude.”

“We took the liberty of saving thousands of human lives. We assumed that given the circumstances, you wouldn’t object.”

“Yeah yeah, trillions of dollars spent building the ultimate in private housing, and it’s all blown. All gone.” The room rotated around him, leaving him spread-eagle on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. He took another drink of bourbon to compensate. “I’ll have to dream up something else now. Maybe go back to the Ice Citadel. No! Fuck, what am I saying? It was cold there. I am, like, not a cold-weather person. I learned that about myself.”

“So your venture was successful, then?”

“Oh, brother, was it ever. I found out everything; who put the barriers up, why they did it, why they won’t help us. And I’ll tell you something else, I was right about the Silfen, too.”

“Do they evolve into an adult state?”

“Ah ha.” Ozzie wagged a finger at the slow wavestorm of glowing lines. “I thought you’d want to know that. Man, you should have seen where they live. The gas halo is like totally groovy. Maybe I should try and build one. I’d just love to see Nigel’s face when I tell him that.”

“Who built the barriers?”

“Clouddancer said it was some race called the Anomines. But that was in a dream. I think. Anyway, they’re not around anymore. Actually, no, cancel that; they are but they’re not the same. I think they out-evolved the Silfen, some of them anyway. The others all went back home and joined Greenpeace.” Ozzie smiled lazily. The bed was wonderfully soft, and he was very tired now. He closed his eyes. “They’re not going to help us, you know. You’d dig that. You haven’t been majorly helpful here, have you? Apart from scooping up that Mellanie chick. Damn, she’s hot. Do you know if she’s dating anyone?” He yawned. Waited for the answer. “Oh, come on, man, you’re not pissed at me, are you? Just a few home truths among friends. You’ve got to grow thicker skin.”

There was still no reply. The light in the room changed.

“Mr. Isaac.”

“Huh?” That wasn’t the SI. Ozzie opened his eyes. The tangerine and turquoise lines had vanished. He swung around toward the sound of the new voice, or tried to; the bed kept getting in the way. A man’s head slid into view. Upside down, and frowning. “Hey!” Ozzie exclaimed happily. “Nelson. Been too long, man. How’s it hanging?”

“I’m glad to see you’re all right.”

“Never better.”

“Quite. Nigel would like a word.”

“Bring him on in.”

“It’s easier if we take you to him.”

“Sure thing. Let me find my shoes.” Ozzie finally managed to move, and slithered off the end of the bed to land in a heap on the floor. Something hurt. It probably belonged to him. “Can you see them?” he asked Nelson earnestly.

Nelson smiled blankly, and beckoned. Ozzie was lifted to his feet by two powerful young men in gray business suits. They had identical red and green OCtattoos on their cheeks, a stack of centimeter-long lines that looked like neon sideburns.

“Hi, guys. Good to meet you.”

They carried him out of the bedroom. Orion was in the lounge outside, still wearing his fancy white and scarlet jacket. The boy looked very scared. There were a lot of people in the lounge with him, just like the ones carrying Ozzie: polite well-built men and women without any sense of humor.

“Ozzie?” Orion said; he bit his lip, looking fearfully at Nelson.

“Hang tight there, little dude, everything’s perfectly under control. Where’s Tochee?”

“I am here, friend Ozzie.”

“Do as they say.” Being vertical wasn’t good. Ozzie’s stomach didn’t like it. He threw up.

They carried him into the service elevator. There was a convoy of big dark cars outside the hotel. He was bundled into the first one. The short drive ended with him being carried onto a hypersonic aircraft, just big enough to accommodate Tochee at the back where a dozen seats had been removed.

Nelson sat down opposite Ozzie and produced a large red tablet. “Take this.”

“What is it?”

“Something to help.”

“I’m not ill.”

Fingers pinched his nose shut, and he opened his mouth in reflex. The tablet was shoved in, followed by water. Ozzie half swallowed, half gagged. “Oh, brother.”

Nelson leaned back. “Strap him in. He’s going to need it.”

The flight was truly horrible. Ozzie shivered violently in his seat, his skin feverish. He desperately wanted to be sick again, but it was as if his stomach had grown an extra membrane to prevent it. The acidic heartburn down his gullet spread right through his gut. His headache seemed to be sweating its way through his skull.

An hour later his teeth had stopped chattering. The aches and discomfort were fading away, leaving his clothes soaked in cold sweat. “I fucking hate sober-ups,” Ozzie growled at Nelson. “They’re not natural. Son of a bitch, look at my clothes.” He plucked at his wet T-shirt in disgust.

“We brought your bags,” Nelson said. “You can freshen up on the train. We’ll be landing in five minutes.”

“Landing where?”

“The planetary station.”

“Great. I’ve got to pee.”

Nelson gestured down the aisle.

Ozzie slowly slipped his straps off, and rose unsteadily to his feet. Orion was sitting in the chair behind. “You okay there, dude?”

The boy nodded. “I think Tochee was worried, but I told him we’d be all right. He doesn’t understand how important you are.”

“I’ll try and explain to it later.”

“Ozzie,” the boy said quietly. “She’s really nice. We talked a lot. She’s called Lauren. She was really interested in the Silfen paths and where we’ve been.”

Ozzie glanced around at the security team member Orion was surreptitiously indicating. “Uh, okay; again, she’s polite in that serial-killer fashion because that’s her job. Don’t ask her to marry you or anything.”

“All right, Ozzie.” The boy pouted.

The hypersonic came down on a landing pad behind the station’s cluster of administration buildings. There was no one around to see them disembark and hurry over to the sleek private maglev express with its two carriages.

“Just us?” Ozzie asked when he looked down the deserted front carriage. There were big spherical chairs set along the length of the carriage, with a bar at the far end.

“Just you,” Nelson confirmed.

Ozzie took one of his new cases into the washroom to change. His attempt to interface with the unisphere was completely unsuccessful. His inserts reported the train was efficiently screened.

Back out in the carriage, Ozzie raided the bar for some sandwiches, then went to sit near to Tochee and Orion. He acted as tour guide as the express hurtled along, pointing out the worlds they passed through. The Big15 planet Shayoni first, which led to Beijing, followed by a fast trip around the trans-Earth loop to New York, and finally Augusta.

“Your transport is so much more efficient that the Silfen method,” Tochee said. “And your worlds so ordered. Do you disapprove of disarray?”

“Don’t judge us on what you’ve seen so far,” Ozzie told it.

At New Costa station their train peeled away from the main area of the yard to slide through a lone gateway.

“And this has to be Cresset,” Ozzie said. “I haven’t been here for a while.”

“Seventy-three years,” Nelson said as the maglev glided in to Illanum station. More dark cars were waiting for them.

“Where now?” Ozzie asked.

“One of Nigel’s residences just outside the town.”

“All of us?”

“Yes, all of you. We have suitable rooms prepared.”

“Okay then.” Ozzie was giving the station’s cargo handling sector a suspicious look. Its capacity had jumped up by an order of magnitude since he’d last visited.

The “residence” was a big mansion of pale stone modeled on the stately homes of eighteenth-century Europe. It was several kilometers out of town, and surrounded by towering trees that were oppressively dark in the deepening twilight.

“You’ll be all right,” Ozzie told his companions when they walked into the big entrance hall. Orion’s expression was dropping into a sullenness that Ozzie recognized only too well. “Get some sleep, we’ll talk in the morning.”

Nelson led the way through the mansion to a study overlooking the front lawns. There was a greenway outside, barely visible now the sun had set. Ozzie wasn’t sure if he remembered it or not; it did seem vaguely familiar. He resented not having access to the unisphere after only just being reconnected.

Nigel was waiting in a big leather armchair. “Thanks, Nelson.”

Nelson smiled tightly and left, closing the door behind him. Ozzie’s inserts told him a strong e-seal had come on around the room. “Just us, huh?”

“Just us.” Nigel waved a hand at a chair identical to his own.

“Shouldn’t the fire be blazing away?” Ozzie said as he sat down. “With like maybe one of those big hairy dogs stretched out in front of it.”

“Irish wolfhound.”

“And you an’ me jiving away with some brandy.”

“You’ve had enough to drink today.”

“Okay, Nige, so what’s with the big CIA spook operation? My unisphere address is open. You could have called.”

“Better this way. That kid you’ve turned up with tells an interesting story. And the alien; nobody’s seen anything like it before. Communication by photoluminescent visual signals in the ultraviolet spectrum. The xenobiologists are going to love that.”

“Tochee’s an okay dude, sure.”

“So you walked the Silfen paths?”

“Yeah, man. They are the most incredible wormhole network imaginable. I think they’re sentient in their own right. That’s why we can never quite track them down, they move the whole time, opening and closing, timeshifting, too.”

“Figures. Incorporating a wormhole’s control routines into a self-sustaining exotic energy matrix is one of our research projects.”

“Clunky, man, so clunky compared to this.”

“So what did you find? Have they got an SI equivalent?”

“Yeah, something like that. It has a shitload of data, like a galactic library. I know who put the barriers around the Dyson Pair.”

Nigel listened silently while Ozzie told him about finding the Ice Citadel, and Tochee, and seeing the ghost planet’s history, and finally ending up in the gas halo. “So this Anomine species isn’t going to help us?” he asked.

“No,” Ozzie said. “Sorry, man.”

“That was a well-spent time away, then. Are you happy?”

“Hey, fuck you!”

“Why did you order the Dynasty political office to prevent anyone examining cargo sent to Far Away?”

“Uh.” Ozzie gave a sickly grin. That wasn’t exactly what he was expecting to talk about. “Well, man, you know, like, it was oppressive. I don’t dig that at all.”

“Ozzie, give the bullshit routine a rest, will you? There’s too much at stake. If you haven’t worked it out yet, I’m trying to decide whose side you’re on.”

“Side?”

“Are you a Starflyer agent, Ozzie?” Nigel asked quietly. There was a glint of moisture in his eye. “Damnit, do you have any idea how much it hurts just to have to ask you that?”

“You know the Starflyer’s real?” an equally astounded Ozzie blurted.

“Yeah, we know it’s real, we just found out. So, why the political restriction?”

“I didn’t know if it was real.”

“What made you even suspect?”

“I met this dude, Bradley Johansson, man, could he spin a story. He claimed he’d been to the gas halo, that the Silfen had removed his Starflyer conditioning. I’d never heard anything like it. He almost made sense. So I asked myself, what if he was right? You know? I mean, it’s a big universe out there, Nige, anything is possible.”

“So you took a chance, and threw in with him. It was fun, wasn’t it, Ozzie; fun being on the other side, sticking it to the man.”

“I’m not that shallow.”

“Yes you are.” Nigel narrowed his eyes. “When did you meet him?”

“God, man, I dunno, like over a century ago.”

“Before or after he founded the Guardians?”

“Same time. He was just getting his act together.”

Nigel tented his fingers in front of his face, staring hard at Ozzie. Suddenly his eyes widened in shock. “Oh, my God, you stupid, stupid son of a bitch. I don’t believe it.”

“What?” Ozzie asked, disturbed by his friend’s behavior.

“The Great Wormhole Heist.”

“Ah.” Ozzie couldn’t help a slight smirk. “That.”

“You helped him. I always wondered how the hell they got into the supercomputer routines we’d written; the access codes were all our personal encryption. You gave him the codes, didn’t you?”

“Better than that,” Ozzie said evilly.

“How better?”

“I was one of them.”

“One of…oh, fuck, Ozzie. You were part of the Great Wormhole Heist?”

“Sure, man, it was a blast.”

“A blast? Jee-zus, Ozzie, that was Paula Myo’s case. Suppose she’d caught Johansson? His memory read would have shown you taking part.”

“It was worth it. You have no idea how high I got creeping around that museum, giving the guards the finger when the force field came on around us. Then we just waltzed right into the Vegas vault. Shit, Nigel, even we don’t have that much money. It was stacked to the fucking rooftops, like a dragon’s bed of gold.”

“It’s less than an hour’s income for CST, you dickbrain, and we own half of Vegas anyway. Why didn’t you just give Johansson an open credit transfer?”

“I knew you wouldn’t get it. Nigel, man, we built that machine with our own two hands; it’s still our finest hour, not CST. That was the two of us against the world back then. That generator was built with love, it’s part of us, the kid our souls had together. It wasn’t fair leaving it to be gawped at by bunches of schoolkids like some freakshow exhibit. I gave it a swan song that’ll never be forgotten.”

“It wasn’t in danger of being overlooked; it’s the foundation for our whole society.” Nigel groaned out loud, and appealed silently to whatever rationality Ozzie believed in. “Why didn’t you just come and tell me about the Starflyer?”

“And you’d have listened, and taken it all seriously? Come on. Nige, you are The Man. You’d have told me and Johansson to go take a flying leap, then given me another lecture about being stoned.” He gave his friend a kindly smile. “How long have you known the Starflyer is real, Nige, I mean, really accepted it’s a genuine twenty-four-karat pain in humanity’s ass? Be honest.”

“We’ve suspected something weird’s been going on behind the scenes for a while now. I wasn’t sure if it was the SI. One of its agents was involved.”

“How long?” Ozzie chanted; he wasn’t about to let Nigel off this one.

“Couple of days.”

“Pretty good. Longer than I’d have given you credit for.”

“Oh, like you were sure,” Nigel snapped back. “You who were so confident you used Johansson as an excuse to play superthief for kicks. You know, I bet you’re secretly pissed Johansson hasn’t been caught. For a hundred thirty years you’ve been waiting for this little stunt to get added to the catalogue of Ozzie legends, haven’t you?”

Ozzie pulled a sullen expression, modeled on Orion at his worst. “I was playing long odds, is all. I told you: Johansson was convincing. Somebody should have taken a close look. And don’t sit there telling me I shouldn’t have done anything. Look outside and see the kind of super-deep shit we’re in right now.”

“Were.”

“What?”

“Were in deep shit. I’ve managed to pull us out of it. There’s not going to be any more MorningLightMountain anymore, or the Starflyer.”

That little edge of conceit was something about Nigel that always bugged Ozzie. “What have you done, Nigel?”

“I’m sending a ship to Dyson Alpha; a nova bomb is going to take care of MorningLightMountain once and for all. This is all going to be settled within a week.”

“Nova bomb? Is that what your secret weapon is? Nobody on the unisphere knows. What the fuck is it?”

“Same principle as a diverted-energy-function nuke, but bigged up like you wouldn’t believe. Our Dynasty weapons development team took the diverted-energy principle, and bolted it onto a quantumbuster. Simple really, the quantumbuster effect field converts any matter within its radius directly into energy, only now that energy is diverted into expanding the effect field farther. And that’s a lot of energy. The field grows large enough to convert a measurable percentage of a star, which gives us an explosion on the same scale as a nova. It annihilates the star and any planet orbiting within a hundred AUs. The radiation will be lethal to any habitable planet within another thirty or so light-years.”

Ozzie frowned, horribly intrigued despite every liberal moral he possessed. “That’s an impossible feedback.”

“Not quite. It only has to hold together for a fraction of a second. Conversion is almost instantaneous. That gives us a loophole.”

“No.” Ozzie put his hands to his temples, shaking his head hard enough to make his hair wave from side to side. Realization of what was about to happen was affecting his body far worse than any little sober-up tablet forced down his throat. He really did think he was going to be physically sick. “No, no, I don’t give shit about the mechanics. Nigel, you can’t do this, man. You can’t kill MorningLightMountain, it is the Primes now, their whole species.”

“We’ve been through this, Ozzie; the War Cabinet, Dynasty heads, the StPetersburg team; we looked at every tactical scenario, every option. There’s nothing else we can do. MorningLightMountain is trying to exterminate us, just like the Starflyer planned. Maybe you should have tried a little harder to get me to take notice of Johansson instead of playing the romantic underdog. Not that you ever were that, Ozzie, it just suits you to pretend so you can get laid more often. Well, wake up and smell the coffee; we’re not college students anymore, Ozzie, we left California behind three and a half centuries ago. Grow up; I had to—and I get laid more than you because of it. Why do you think I used your name in the War Cabinet announcement? People trust you, Ozzie, they like you. If you’d kicked up a fuss back when you met Johansson, they would have listened; Heather would have busted the Starflyer’s corruption apart like a jackhammer on glass. Don’t go around blaming me and calling me a warmonger. You knew, Ozzie, you goddamn knew about a threat to the entire human race, and you didn’t fucking tell anyone. Who’s to blame, Ozzie? Who backed us into this corner, huh? Who took away our options?”

Ozzie had sunk back into the chair as Nigel’s voice grew louder. It wasn’t often Nigel, the original calculating iceman, lost his temper, but when he did it was best not to interrupt—people had been ruined, or worse, for making that mistake. Besides, there was a nasty taste of guilt spreading around Ozzie’s brain like a fast-acting poison. “It’s genocide, man,” he said simply and quietly. There was no logical argument he could come up with to counter the tirade. “It is so not what we are.”

“You think I don’t fucking know that,” Nigel stormed. “I wore the same T-shirts as you, I went on the same marches. I hated the military industrial imperialism that ran the world back then. Now look where you’ve put me!”

“Okay.” Ozzie raised his hands. “Just calm down, man.”

“I am fucking calm. Anybody else, Ozzie, and I mean anybody, and they would have been wiped from history by now. Nobody would question what happened to you, because you would never have existed.”

“I’ve seen it happen, man,” Ozzie whispered. “I walked one of the ghost planets. I witnessed their history; I felt them die, Nigel, every last one of them. You can’t let it happen. You just can’t, I’m begging you, man. I’m on my goddamn knees, here. Don’t do this.”

“There is no other way.”

“There’s always another way. Look, Clouddancer said the barrier generator was only disabled, not destroyed.”

Nigel gave him a startled look. “It was a variant on the flare bomb, we think; it altered the generator’s quantum structure.”

“There, see! The generator is still there. We’ve just got to repair it, get it working again.”

“Ozzie!” Nigel gave his friend a weary, despairing look. “You’re grasping at straws. It’s not you.”

“We have to try.”

“Ozzie, think it through. The barrier generator is the size of a planet, and we’ve got days, maybe only hours before MorningLightMountain strikes back at the Commonwealth. If it does, it will kill us, it will genocide the human race. Do you understand that?”

“Let me try,” Ozzie implored. “You’re sending a ship, right, the one with the nova bomb?”

“Yeah. We developed something new, Ozzie, this drive is something else again. It doesn’t use any of our old wormhole technology; you really do just jump into hyperspace. MorningLightMountain can’t detect it.”

“Perfect! Let me go on it. I can take a look at the generator. You know if anyone can work it out, I can.”

“Ozzie—”

“MorningLightMountain won’t know I’m there. If it starts an attack on the Commonwealth I’ll fling a nova bomb into its star myself. But we have to try this. Let me go, Nigel. It’s a chance. I know you, man; you won’t be able to live with yourself if you don’t at least consider it.”

“Ozzie, every physicist in the Commonwealth has been studying the data which the Second Chance gathered on the generator. We don’t even know what some of the shells are, let alone what they do. And we certainly don’t know how to build sections of them. Not inside a week. Get real here.”

“I can do it, I know I can. There must be a self-repair function, something that can undo the damage. Yeah! Clouddancer said it should outlive the star itself. If the Starflyer could have destroyed the generator, it would. That gives us a chance.”

“You’re not going, Ozzie.”

“Give me one good reason.”

“I don’t trust you.”

For a moment Ozzie thought Nigel had hit him—his skin certainly went numb the way it did after a sharp blow. He couldn’t hear anything either. The air in the study had turned dead. “What?” His voice was a piteous croak.

“I don’t know if you’re a Starflyer agent or not. If it’s going to take a last shot at defeating us, then this would be absolutely perfect. So read my lips: you are not taking our two most secret weapons into the MorningLightMountain star system by yourself. They are the only guarantees of racial survival we’ve got.”

“I’m not a Starflyer agent,” Ozzie said meekly. “You can’t really think that.”

“You’re either a friend of Johansson’s like you said, or a Starflyer agent. Those are the only two reasons for stopping the Far Away cargo inspections, because both groups need to get their equipment through without drawing any official attention. Right now, Johansson is out of contact on his way to Far Away, so I can’t confirm your story short of a memory read. I don’t want to do that, even if we had the time—which we don’t. So for now, I’m doing what any good friend would do, and quarantining you. When Johansson gets back, he’ll be able to vouch for you. I’m sorry, Ozzie, but we’ve learned the hard way just how deep the Starflyer has penetrated our society. I’m even partly to blame for that. I let that sonofabitch Alster fool me, which is going to take some serious piety on my part to recover from. And we both know how hard that will be.”

“You really mean this, don’t you, Nige; you’re not going to let me go.”

“I can’t. If this was reversed, you wouldn’t either.”

“Oh, man. This is the only chance we’ve got to save our souls. We can’t commit genocide.”

“We have to.”

“Look, will you at least tell the captain to take a flyby of the generator?”

“Sure thing, Ozzie. We’ll do that.”

Ozzie knew that tone, Nigel was just humoring him. “You son of a bitch.”

Nigel stood up. “You and your friends will stay here until this is settled. I can’t give you unisphere access, but if there’s anything you want, just ask.”

Ozzie almost told him where to stick his hospitality. “All the data on the generator. I’m going to look at it anyway.”

“Fair enough, Ozzie.”

“And if I find a way of fixing it…”

“I’ll bend over and you can kick my ass into orbit.”

“Damn right I will. Oh, and Nigel, get the boy a girl, will you? A sweet one, not some fifth-lifer.”

Nigel gave him an irritated glance. “Do I look like a pimp?”

Ozzie smiled.

“This is only going to take a week,” Nigel said. “He can wait.”

“Hey, come on, man, we could all be dead by then. The kid’s never been laid. Now you’ve gone and flung him in jail. Five-star, sure, but it’s still the pen. Give him a break.”

“Ozzie—”

“If you can’t call out for a hooker, send one of your wives along. They’re all about his age anyway.”

“You can’t annoy me into doing this.”

“Just do it, Nige, show some humanity here. I’ll pick up the tab if it bothers you that much.”

“Whatever.” Nigel went out of the door with a fractious wave of his hand.

“Fuck you very much,” Ozzie shouted after him.

***

Eight hours into the flight to Port Evergreen, and the Carbon Goose passengers were finally starting to relax. There was a general feeling among them now that they might actually make it to the wormhole generator after all. Tail winds had picked up as they crossed the ocean. Wilson had announced their projected flight time was another hour and a quarter at most.

Paula wasn’t anything like as optimistic as the others. The Starflyer only needed a five-minute lead on them through the wormhole. Even with their reduced flight time, it was going to get close on forty minutes. Apart from a couple of hours spent in a fitful sleep, she’d spent her time reviewing contingency survival plans. There were plenty of scenarios loaded into the avionics, mostly connected with the plane being forced to ditch in the ocean. Given that each Carbon Goose carried emergency food packs, and there were more stores at Shackleton and Port Evergreen, she estimated that they’d have enough to eat for between seventeen to twenty months. It would mean returning to Shackleton where the other planes were parked, but they weren’t facing instant doom. Power and warmth were certainly easy enough; the micropiles could supply them with electricity for decades.

She walked back through the top passenger deck, which everyone had settled in. The Guardians regarded her with expressions of suspicion and hostility. Not that it bothered her; open animosity was a near constant companion in her job. Cat’s Claws simply ignored her, while the three remaining members of the Paris team smiled warmly as she passed. The stairs at the back of the cabin took her down to the next deck, which had its lights down low. She could just see the horizon through the small circular windows, a fuzzy pink line separating the black ocean from a star-filled sky. Flashes from the neutron star sent a broad livid blue shimmer across the water, leaving a purple afterimage on her retinas. They were just keeping ahead of the dawn, which was scheduled to catch up with them twenty minutes after they reached Port Evergreen.

Four more sets of stairs, and two pressure hatches put her in the lower cargo hold, where all their vehicles were stowed. The turbine noise was loudest here, almost as if there was some kind of combustion engine operating somewhere close by. Even with Wilson turning the heating on full, it was chilly in the big compartment. She zipped up the black and lavender fleece that had been in her CST executive travel pack and walked to the center, where Qatux was spending the journey. They’d managed to find half a dozen emergency heaters, which now ringed the large alien blowing warm air on its dark gray hide.

Nobody knew anything about Raiel physiology, so Paula couldn’t tell if its occasional shivering was the same reaction that humans had to cold, or a manifestation of its little dependency problem. Two of its smaller tentacles quivered as she approached.

“Paula, you are most welcome,” it sighed hoarsely.

“Thank you.”

Tiger Pansy was sitting on a crate beside Qatux, wearing the contents of two travel packs over her skirt and blouse. For once she’d abandoned her heels to use a pair of boots, then pulled some fur-lined travel slippers on top of them. She still looked miserably cold, her gloved hands cupped around a mug of tomato soup.

Adam and Bradley had also pulled up some crates. Their expressions remained neutral as she sat on the corner of the crate that Tiger Pansy was using. For whatever reason, Bradley had never gone in for reprofiling or genetic modification; he was still maintaining his mid-thirties age, though she’d never been able to track down which rejuvenation clinic he used. A tall man, especially compared to her, with his fair hair shading almost to silver-blond, contrasting with the darkest eyes she’d ever seen, his handsome features rose with a welcoming smile, not in the least triumphant, merely polite. Bradley was genuinely pleased to have her with them, though she would not forget nor forgive the terms that had brought her on board.

Adam couldn’t be more different from the founder of the Guardians; much squatter than Bradley’s athletically lanky frame, with muscle bulk that had been added since their last confirmed image of him on Velaines. Most of the Paris office would have walked right past him without a flicker of recognition, but after so long Paula could identify his face anywhere no matter what reprofiling he gave himself. Indeed, after so many changes there was now a severe limit on any new alterations. This new rounded face that alluded to youthful middle age was a strong warning against so much economic self-applied cellular reprofiling. His cheeks and chin were leathery, and afflicted with what appeared to be a mild form of eczema. The collar of his semiorganic coat was plagued by strands of dark hair that was dropping out like a radiation victim’s.

“Shaving must be painful,” she said.

Adam’s hand went halfway to his face before he became conscious of it. “There are suitable creams, thank you for your concern. You don’t look too hot yourself right now. Travel sick, Investigator?”

“Just tired.”

“Please,” Bradley pleaded.

“I’ve been assessing our food supplies should we be stuck here,” Paula said. “We should be all right for some time, but I came to ask what Qatux eats.”

All five of the Raiel’s eye stalks swiveled around in unison to focus on her. “Your concern is touching, Paula. There is no need for alarm. I will be able to digest human food. I estimate I will consume as much as five human adults per day. With the exception of curry. It does not agree with my digestive process.”

“Hey, me neither,” Tiger Pansy chirped in.

“Are you all right?” Paula asked her. “I can spell you if you want to sleep.”

“That’s real kind. I’m okay, though. I grabbed a few hours in here a while back.”

“Do you and Mr. Elvin intend to argue with each other?” Qatux asked. “You have been adversaries for many years now. I would find such contrary and emotional discourse to be most elating.”

“I’m not looking for a fight,” Paula said stiffly. “This is a new situation, for both of us.”

Adam looked up at the Raiel. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Old human saying.”

“Do you really set aside old battles so easily?”

“Put it into context with the threat of humanity’s extermination, and you’ll understand,” Paula said.

“It’s kinda sweet,” Tiger Pansy said. “That we can all just get along, you know.”

“Thank you, my dear,” Qatux said. “That was a most impressive feeling of sympathy and, I believe, camaraderie.”

“That’s why I get the big bucks,” she said, giggling. “Not!”

Paula turned to Bradley. “The good news is that if the Starflyer does close the wormhole behind it, we will be able to survive.”

“You might, my dear, but for me such failure will be worse than death.”

“I understand. I’d like to know now, what exactly are your plans. I might be able to help.”

“Plans,” Bradley murmured sadly. “I had grand plans, Investigator. Once. Today, things have become somewhat fluid. All we can do is hope that our friends on Far Away find some way of preventing the Starflyer from going through the wormhole until we arrive at Port Evergreen. That way we might still manage to corner it and kill it. Dreaming heavens, I cannot believe it has come to this.”

Paula glanced over at the Volvos lurking in the gloom around her, their tops nearly touching the roof of the cargo hold. “So what are they carrying? What have you been smuggling to Far Away all these years?”

“Don’t look at me.” Adam grunted. “I’m just the hired hand who arranges shipment.”

“Bradley?” Paula asked.

“I had devised a scheme to give the planet its revenge. It requires a great deal of sophisticated force field technology to implement.”

“How does force field technology kill the Starflyer? Do you trap it inside one?”

“Oh no, the planet’s revenge is designed to destroy the Marie Celeste. I intended to release it when we knew the Starflyer was on its way back. Without its ship, it will be truly marooned on Far Away. It can’t go home, and it can’t return to the Commonwealth. We can hunt it down and kill it.”

“So if it does get through the wormhole to Far Away ahead of us, will the Guardians be able to release this revenge scheme?”

“Possibly; though without the equipment we’ve brought it will be weaker than I would like. And of course the data you and Senator Burnelli retrieved from Kazimir is extremely important.”

“As far as we could determine, it was just meteorological information from Mars.”

“You determined right, my dear. We intend to channel Far Away’s weather at the Marie Celeste. As well as being extremely effective against that brute machine, it is fitting to give Far Away the chance for retribution. It was the flare bomb released by the Marie Celeste which came so close to totally annihilating the entire planetary biosphere.”

“Weather?” Paula frowned, even she couldn’t work out the variables in that puzzle. “You’re going to use the weather against a starship?”

“Yes. Did you know the Halgarth Dynasty commands the lion’s share of force field sales in the Commonwealth because of the systems given to them by the Starflyer in the guise of Institute research?”

“I know they’re the market leaders, yes.”

“It was inevitable, really. The Marie Celeste traveled through space at near relativistic velocity for hundreds of years. It had to have superb force fields to survive such a punishing environment. That makes it extremely difficult for us to attack. It would certainly be impervious to fusion bombs, even if we wanted to employ them on Far Away. The kind of modern, sophisticated weapons powerful enough to break the Marie Celeste’s force field are essentially impossible to obtain. They are simply not available on the black market. Their manufacture would be even more difficult. The Commonwealth has an effective monitoring network in place for dual use manufacturing systems, which even Adam would have trouble circumventing.”

“So how do you use weather when our best weapons are ineffective?”

“We generate a superstorm, and use force field–derived mechanisms to steer it. Far Away is blessed with a rather unique meteorological system, partly due to its size, partly its geography. A major storm evolves out over the Hondu Ocean every night, and blows in across the Grand Triad. That will become our powerhouse; we have evolved a mechanism to amplify that and direct it onto the Marie Celeste. In theory, I should add. Nobody has ever put such an idea into practice before.”

“Mars has storms,” Paula said abruptly. “Big storms.”

“Well done, Investigator. Mars is subject to planetary storms that last months, sometimes years. It also shares Far Away’s low gravity, which makes it the closest match in the Commonwealth. The data we collected there will be invaluable for our control routines.”

“Do you really think you can control the weather?”

“A better description would be to aggravate it and direct it. And yes, we believe it is possible; for a short while at least, and that is all we ask.”

“It will require a phenomenal amount of energy. Even I can see that.”

“Yes. That’s taken care of.”

Paula wanted to point out flaws, it seemed such a bizarre notion, not one you should depend on to bring a hundred-thirty-year-old crusade to its climax; but she didn’t know enough about the procedures Johansson had dreamed up. It just had to be taken on faith. “Assuming you can direct a superstorm, and I’m still skeptical about that, what use will that be against a starship whose force fields can protect it against nuclear weapons?”

“Its size is its downfall,” Bradley said intently. “We intend to initiate the planet’s revenge while the Marie Celeste remains on the ground, where it is most vulnerable. The superstorm will be powerful enough to pick it up and fling it to its destruction. And the beauty is, if its force fields are switched on, the surface area they will present to the storm is even larger, while the overall mass remains the same—which makes it even easier for the winds to pick it up and smash it.”

“I see the logic,” Paula said. “I’m just not convinced about the practicality.”

Johansson slumped down. “We’ll probably never know now.”

“I’ve been thinking about our arrival at Port Evergreen,” Paula said. “Do you have any more of those reconnaissance drones?”

“Two in each armored car,” Adam told her.

“We need to try to launch them when we get within their flight range of Port Evergreen.”

Adam gazed down the length of the cargo hold. “Should be fun.”

They were a hundred kilometers out from Port Evergreen when Wilson took the Carbon Goose down to a kilometer above the water.

“Are you ready?” he asked Adam, who was in the armored car closest to the rear loading ramp.

“Systems engaged. The drones are ready to fly.”

“Stand by: depressurizing.” Wilson’s lime-green virtual hands swept over control symbols.

“No effect on stability,” Oscar reported from the copilot’s chair.

“Anything on radar?” They’d switched their own radar off now they were close to their destination. If the two Carbon Goose planes the Starflyer had taken were still using their radar, the signals should be detectable.

“Nothing,” Oscar said. “I guess the Starflyer’s planes are down.”

“Damn, I almost want to make a sweep just to find out.”

“This is our only advantage,” Oscar said. “It doesn’t know we’re coming.”

“Not much of an advantage.”

“It’s the only one in town,” Anna pointed out.

“Okay, let’s stick with the plan,” Wilson said. His displays were showing him the lower cargo hold was now pressure-equalized. “Opening the hold doors now,” he told Adam.

They were all bracing themselves for the giant plane to judder. It never happened. The only way Wilson could even tell the doors were opening was through his virtual vision display.

“Launching,” Adam said. “One away. Wow, that’s a tumble. Looking good, the array is pulling it out of the dive. Leveling off. Okay, launching two.”

Wilson closed the doors, then took the Carbon Goose down to three hundred meters. It was as low as he dared go without any sort of radar to check how far they really were above the sea. The altitude should help them get closer to Port Evergreen before they were detected.

Everyone on board accessed the secure signal from the drones as they raced on ahead. Infrared showed a faint outline of the sheer rock island as they closed on Port Evergreen. Brighter, salmon-pink patches glowed above the waterline, nestled in the broad dip in the cliff.

“They’re down,” Adam said.

“Plenty of activity there,” Morton said. “I can see movement.”

“Vehicles, I think,” Paula said. “The heat is coming from their engines.”

The picture resolution built rapidly as the drones closed in. Both the Carbon Goose planes were easy to distinguish, parked just above the sea, their turbines glowing like small suns. Some way back from the water, the six huts and long temporary accommodation building registered a few degrees above the ambient temperature; the lone hangar only showed up on the grainy light amplification scan. The curving generator building was an all-over ginger hue, with a shimmer of silver light oozing out through its pressure curtain. Eight large trucks were on the ground just in front of it, their combustion engines on. The drones could even pick up the carbon monoxide fumes squirting out of the exhaust pipes. Three of them had heated trailers, big oblong boxes protected by force fields.

“They haven’t gone through,” Adam said in astonishment. “What the hell are they waiting for? They’ve only got forty minutes left before the wormhole cycle ends.”

“Stig,” Bradley said. “It has to be. He’s stalled them somehow.”

The drones were close enough now to pick out individual humans on the ground. Five people in pressure suits were clustered right in front of the force field. There was a lot of encrypted signal traffic between them and the trucks.

“We’ve got a chance,” Adam said. “Wilson, circle us around. Everyone on the drop combat team, stand by.”

Wilson was sure he could hear cheering from the top deck as he altered the Carbon Goose’s flight path by a couple of degrees. He felt like joining in. Oscar was grinning sinfully beside him. Anna put her arms around his shoulders and delivered a happy kiss.

A camera in the lower cargo deck showed him ten armored figures making their way slowly back toward the rear door as it opened again. Cat’s Claws and the Paris team were all in the same kind of suit, while the four Guardians who’d joined them were in the best marque aggressor suit available on the black market.

“Rather them than me,” Oscar said. “Did you access Gore Burnelli’s little drop into Park Avenue? That assassin was in bad shape when he hit.”

“The navy suits are up to it,” Wilson said. “I remember the specs we drew up. And Adam wouldn’t let his people take part unless he was confident.”

“Here’s hoping.”

Wilson raised their altitude by another hundred fifty meters. The cliff that surrounded the vast island was over a hundred meters high in places. He’d navigated blind before—yeah right, three hundred fifty years ago—and the golden rule was always give yourself enough leeway in enemy territory. The Carbon Goose avionics had an excellent inertial navigation system, but it was hardly designed with this kind of stunt in mind.

He switched off all the internal lights, including the cockpit. “One minute till we reach the shoreline,” he told everyone.

Oscar removed the optical limiter from the windshield, and Wilson switched his retinal inserts to full light amplification. “I think I see the cliff.”

Red warning icons appeared in the plane’s navigation function section.

“It doesn’t like where we are,” Oscar growled. “That makes two of us.”

Wilson’s virtual hands moved to disengage the warnings. He’d eliminated three of them when the Carbon Goose’s radar switched on. “Shit!” Its return image swept across half of his virtual vision, splashing a green and purple portrait of the sea and the approaching cliff face. “Anna, kill the fucking radar. Shoot it if you have to.”

It took her several seconds to shut down the power, then load a series of restrictions into the ground collision safeguard programs that were monitoring the flight.

“Goddamnit,” Wilson spat as they swept in over the crumpled rock. “Adam, they know we’re here; the son of a bitch autopilot switched on the radar. I’m sorry. Do you want to abort?”

“Not an option,” Morton said. “Hold her steady, Wilson, we’re jumping.”

Wilson pressed his hands hard against the console, putting pressure on the i-spots as if that alone would keep the massive plane on course.

“They’ve gone,” Adam said. “Get us the hell out of here.”

Wilson banked the Carbon Goose sharply to starboard, curving them back around to head out to sea again. Behind them, ten armor suits plummeted through the freezing night air at terminal velocity.

***

The baby sneekbot slowly picking its way undetected along the parapet of Market Wall was designed to resemble a cockroach. It worked with five siblings who networked their respective sensor types and relayed the results back to a pack-governor disguised as a rat, which in turn transmitted the data to the operator a safe distance away. They were built by the McSobel clan, who wrapped a plyplastic body around a bioneural array supplied by the Barsoomians. Over eighty of them were scanning First Foot Fall Plaza for the Guardians, providing a reasonably comprehensive image of what the Institute was up to.

As the warm afternoon rolled on they watched the curved rank of parked Range Rover Cruisers in front of the gateway. There were no other vehicles in 3F Plaza. Several squads of Institute troops lounged around in the shade of the awnings set up along the base of the wall, helping themselves to the contents of the abandoned cafés. Just after two o’clock the gateway opened, its pearly force field turning funereal as it exposed the night of Half Way. A couple of people in pressure suits went through.

“Nobody else is moving around there,” Stig said as he reviewed the images. He and Olwen had set up a temporary command post in the Ballard Theater, three kilometers east of 3F Plaza. They’d chosen it because it had a glass-walled rooftop restaurant, which gave them an excellent vantage point out across the city. It also made Stig feel exposed. He switched between the sneekbots and simple eyeball observation, looking out at the blimpbots that were circling the city like fat impatient sharks.

On any normal day, someone would have noticed the twenty-two dark shapes keeping their distance as they went around and around in sedate procession at an unusually low altitude. So far no one had called the aerodrome to ask what was happening. People were too busy either staying at home, intimidated by the police patrols escorted by the Institute’s Range Rover Cruisers, or causing a lot of trouble for those same patrols. Several crowds had gathered on the larger streets, to fling bottles and stones every time they saw a police car.

The Institute didn’t seem to care much, unless anyone started protesting along their clear route out of the city to Highway One; then the troops cracked down hard without any pretense of involving the police. It made it difficult to get the Guardians’ snipers into position. Stig was still trying to infiltrate three teams to fix booby traps to the road. The route that the Institute had cleared used the Tangeat bridge over the Belvoir River. That was his main priority for the booby traps. It was clearly a high-rated concern with whoever was commanding the Institute troops; there were nine Range Rover Cruisers parked on the bridge, their sensors scanning the water below.

“It has to be this cycle,” Olwen said. “They wouldn’t expend this much effort otherwise.”

“Right.” Stig looked out across the rooftops again. Away to the south, another blimpbot was gliding smoothly over Highway One. The faint pink overlay graphic supplied by his virtual vision showed it was one of the six bomb carriers. “I’ve got to change that holding pattern. The Institute’s going to notice them if they keep flying over Highway One like that.”

“Okay,” Olwen said. She knew how pointless it was to argue when his nerves produced that much determination in his voice.

Stig sat at one of the tables and lit a cigarette. He pulled down some smoke, then started opening secure links to the blimpbots. Instead of chasing one big circle around Armstrong City, he split them into two groups, and circled one to the east, and one to the west. North, of course, was the sea. If they all clustered out there, they’d certainly be noticed and queried.

It took nearly two hours and eleven cigarettes before he was satisfied they were all locked into their new holding patterns. The wind was starting to blow in from the North Sea, which gave the blimpbots’ fans extra work to hold them on course. Stig didn’t like the look of the clouds that were scudding in from the horizon; they were getting progressively darker. He knew Armstrong City’s weather well enough by now to recognize when it was going to rain.

An hour later, the first drops of water were hitting the restaurant’s green-tinted glass. They kept the lights off as the sky darkened outside.

“This could complicate things,” he said. “Water adds a lot of weight to the blimpbots. They shouldn’t fly low altitude in the rain.”

“Keely says there’s some big traffic movement along Mantana Avenue,” Olwen said.

Stig’s virtual hand pulled sneekbot images from the grid. They gave him a ground-level view of large wheels rolling past, kicking up a fine spray from the enzyme-bonded concrete. He pulled out an image relayed by a sneekbot that had climbed one of the old maple fur poplars. Two trucks roared past underneath, flanked by Range Rover Cruisers; they were followed by a big MANN truck, whose trailer carried a long buffed-aluminum capsule, with a clump of sophisticated air-conditioning units on one end. More Cruisers followed it, their mounted guns swiveling from side to side.

“Where did that come from?” Stig asked.

“We don’t know,” Keely said. “They must have parked it in a commercial estate somewhere close.”

“More to the point, what is it?” Olwen said. “A life-support cabin for the Starflyer?”

“Could well be,” Stig said. He was tracking the MANN truck with the sneekbot’s sensors. The curving metal walls of the capsule were reinforced by some kind of bonding field, making it virtually impregnable to any portable weapon the Guardians had. It didn’t have any windows. Wisps of steam were rising from the fins of the air-conditioning units as the rain pattered all over them.

“Movement in 3F,” Keely warned.

Stig hurriedly pulled more images from the grid. Eight people in bulky helmeted environment suits were walking out from the CST management building beside the gateway. They went straight through the pressure curtain.

“This is it,” he announced. “It’s got to be; there’s only an hour and a half left in this cycle.” Amazingly he felt almost nothing, no excitement, no dread. Humanity’s most devious enemy was about to arrive on his world, and here he was regarding the moment with cool anticipation. His virtual hand touched the general communications icon. “Status one, everybody. We think it’s coming. Get to your shelter positions, and be ready to move up to engagement point after we hit 3F Plaza.” He stubbed his cigarette out, and settled back in the chair, closing his eyes so he was completely surrounded by his virtual vision. Blue and chrome virtual hands danced across the blimpbot flight command icons as he organized them into their attack formations. He’d been right about the rain, it degraded their performance characteristics, making them even more sluggish than normal. Dangerous in the squally rainstorm. If a gust knocked one off course, it took a longer time than normal to respond and correct itself.

“People are heading back home,” Olwen said. “Rain makes for a bad protest environment.”

Stig pressed himself up against the glass, looking out toward First Foot Fall Plaza, which rose above the surrounding buildings. “That might help us. They’ll be safer indoors.”

“Will they?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. It’s comfortable to believe.” His hand tapped the cold thick slab of glass. “We’d better get out of here.”

Just before they reached the stairs, a lightning flash went off close to shore. Stig saw the blimpbots heading in across the city boundaries. Seen head-on they were big black circles poised above the buildings, seemingly immobile. They were running dark, with their navigation strobes off. It had transformed them; no longer lumbering obsolete throwbacks that drew a smile as their quaint outline slid overhead, they’d obtained a sinister otherworldly appearance as they closed on the overcast human city to deliver their lethal cargo.

“What if it’s Adam coming through?” Olwen asked.

“I have to act on the information we’ve got, however limited. And that truck wasn’t carrying a weapon. It’s the Starflyer.”

“If it is, it’ll blow the wormhole generator as soon as it’s through. We’ll be cut off.”

“I know,” he said, wishing he could answer differently.

“Will Adam be following?”

“I don’t know. Dreaming heavens! He was supposed to be here before now. That blockade-busting operation he put together should have worked.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Carry on with the attack; there’s nothing else we can do. If it’s Adam on Half Way he’ll guess what we’re going to do.”

“Adam doesn’t know what we have here, what our contingencies are.”

“Johansson does. He was going to join the blockade-busting run.”

“Stig, we have to keep the gateway open. They’ll both be trapped on Half Way, along with the equipment we need.”

“We might just have enough equipment for the planet’s revenge. Not that we’ll need it if we can kill the Starflyer today.”

“Long shot,” she exclaimed bitterly. “Very long shot.”

They went out into the street. Stig activated his force field skeleton suit at level one, establishing a minimum field, and zipped up his leather StPetersburg jacket against the rain. Dark rain clouds were blotting out the sun, bringing a premature twilight to Armstrong City.

He hurried along the deserted street, then took a route along several unlit alleys until they came out on Mantana Avenue just above the government district. Here at least the street lighting worked, casting long yellow-hued reflections off the soaking pavement. Lighting in the shabby old buildings behind the maple fur poplars was intermittent, office windows shining with a pearly white sheen as their polyphoto strips remained on, illuminating empty desks and conference rooms. Shops along the ground floor were all shut, their carbon mesh shutters pulled down and bolted, dark and lifeless inside. There was no traffic on the road itself. Civicbots rumbled along the gutters, amber strobes flashing as their rotary brushes cleared the litter and leaves away, keeping the drains free.

Stig picked up the pace as the rain intensified, almost jogging. Branches on the maple fur poplars were drooping low over their heads as the woolly leaves soaked up the water. Thick droplets splattered down. Lightning flickered somewhere close to the docks.

“Here we go,” he said as they reached the turning for Arischal Lane. It led to Bazely Square, which on ordinary days was a busy intersection, with a big grassed-over roundabout in the middle. It had wide pedestrian subways running underneath, which were their designated shelter point during the bomb run.

He turned to go, then halted. Lightning flashed again. One of the blimpbots was sliding over the government district at the far end of Mantana Avenue, its black bulk materializing silently out of the gray rain as it headed toward them. Olwen followed his gaze. “Dreaming heavens, that’s low,” she gasped. The keel was barely ten meters above the roofs of the various government office buildings. Given the size of the blimpbot, such a separation distance was insignificant. Water poured from its flanks to drench the red pan tiles and solar paneling.

Stig watched it tack around slightly, and begin to fly along the broad thoroughfare. On its final approach, the main ducted fans fore and aft spun up to full thrust. It moved fast, a lot faster than he’d anticipated. The tips of the lofty old maple fur poplars scraped along the blimpbot’s fuselage. Cargo doors swung open all the way along its belly.

“Move,” Stig yelled. His overlay graphics told him it wasn’t carrying a bomb, but it was going to draw the Institute’s attention in a big way. He’d been a fool to stop and gawp like a tourist. Adam would be cursing him.

They sprinted down Arischal Lane as the blimpbot slid gracefully along the avenue behind them. It was audible now, the ducted fans whirring urgently, their pitch shifting as they swiveled constantly to maintain the craft’s course against the wind and rain lashing against it. The engine sound was twinned with a coarse ripping noise as the soaking trees along the avenue grated their way along the fuselage.

It eclipsed the entrance to Arischal Lane, a disturbing dark presence dominating the sky. In Stig’s virtual vision, it was one of nine that made up the first attack wave. They were closing on 3F Plaza in a loose circle, set to arrive within a four-minute window. Three of them already had cherry-red damage warning symbols blinking bright; they’d all struck something on their flight over the city: chimney stacks, rotundas, trees, masts slicing through the fuselage fabric to buckle and snap the geodesic stress structure. The holes made little noticeable difference to their aerodynamics or speed as they droned onward relentlessly.

The communications array at the aerodrome reported a burst of calls from the government district and the Governor’s House. It replied with a standard reply of we are forwarding your message for action. More advanced software began to probe the aerodrome’s network, searching out current flight files. The routines that the Guardians had installed were deflecting them, and attempting to Trojan their own disruptor virals into the Institute systems.

Stig reached the end of Arischal Lane, where there was a subway entrance on the corner of the road. He took the stone steps three at a time, before leaping down to the bottom. Olwen followed with a more nimble jump. They both sped forward through the lighted concrete passage to the central junction in the middle of the roundabout. It was set out like a small concrete crater, with polyphoto strips high on the walls. Rain poured down from the dismal sky to gurgle away slowly through drain grilles partially blocked by litter and dirt.

Images from the sneekbots showed Stig the Institute troops in 3F Plaza had finally been alerted to the massive airborne invaders heading toward them. Four Land Rover Cruisers drove into a protective arrangement around the MANN truck and its valuable load, their medium-caliber mounted weaponry ready, small sensor stalks swishing back and forth. The remaining Cruisers were fanning out across 3F Plaza, guns pivoting up to the thick rain clouds, tracking around in search of a target. Troops in flexarmor suits were bounding up the steps on the inside of Market Wall, their long hurdling movements agile in the low gravity. Sneekbots reported an ether thick with encrypted traffic. Scarlet targeting lasers stabbed out, foreshortened in the rain.

“They’re strengthening the force field over the gateway,” Keely reported.

“Good. I want it intact. Adam might still get through.” Stig sat down with his back to a wall, pants in the water trickling along the floor. Olwen knelt down beside him, and gripped his hand. He was glad of the contact. Everything they were dealing with was so remote, his virtual vision display reducing it to the level of some training exercise. “It’s about to begin,” he told everyone over the general band.

The blimpbot sailing along Mantana Avenue was the first to arrive at 3F Plaza. It was also the most easily seen as it began to lift higher just before it reached Market Wall. Institute troops who had it in their target sensors opened fire immediately. Ion pulses and kinetic bullets ripped straight through the fuselage fabric, punctured the forward clump of helium cells and streaked out through the upper fuselage. Occasionally, one would strike a carbon-titanium strut in the stress structure, and inflict a modicum of damage. But the geodesic was designed to retain overall integrity under major impact conditions, the load paths simply shifted around fractionally. Overall, it was like shooting a dense patch of air.

The huge blunt curve of the nose glided up over the Enfield entrance. Dispensers fixed into its cargo bays began to fire volley after volley of chaff, flares, and small electronic warfare drones. For a glorious minute, the gloom was completely banished as dazzling white and red stars swarmed over 3F Plaza, trailing thin lines of smoke. Secondary detonations flashed, and silver chaff scintillated across the sky, before sleeting down. Quieter, gray-blue drones zipped about like hummingbirds, impossible to see, sending out powerful disruptive EM pulses.

Troops on the wall were firing nonstop into the blimpbot as more and more of it slid out across 3F Plaza. Then the Cruisers on the ground opened up. Someone among the Institute officers had obviously taken charge. The heavier caliber kinetic and maser weapons were directed first at the ducted fans protruding from the fuselage, then the guns worked down the keel where the cargo bays were situated. Creases began to appear in the fuselage as the geodesic structure finally succumbed to the violence. Tears started to multiply, exposing the clustered helium cells strung along the interior, translucent white spheres like wax bubbles.

The second blimpbot arrived at 3F just as the flares from the first began to splutter out. Several troops shifted their aim, beginning to understand their targeting priorities. Land Rover Cruisers were firing into the cargo holds even as the dispensers began blasting out their ordnance.

Blimpbots three and four arrived simultaneously. By then, number one was sinking rapidly, the rear third of the fuselage twisting savagely as it fell toward the Enfield entrance. Only inertia kept it moving forward as the badly tattered fuselage fabric ripped into fluttering streamers in imitation of black flame. The nose dipped, angling down on one of the Plaza’s big ornamental fountains. Troops on Market Wall who were still underneath the tail end jumped and sprinted out of the way as its descent accelerated sharply. It crashed over the entrance in elegant slow motion amid a cacophony of snapping and splintering sounds from the geodesic struts as they burst apart. Cruisers and trucks raced away across the Plaza as if they’d just been released from a starting grid while the fuselage kept on collapsing, folding in on itself as though some terrible invisible force was intent on squashing the broken craft completely flat. Above it, white and red flares mingled with the rain, to cloak the slippery fuselage fabric in shimmering patterns.

By then blimpbots two and four were also mortally wounded. They started their uncontrollable descent into the Plaza. Two was swinging around as its tail disintegrated, popping the helium cells like party balloons, an abrupt loss of buoyancy that pulled the rear half down with alarming speed. Its nose punched into the middle of three, which bent the entire stress structure.

Despite the size and surprise of the attack, the Institute troops and equipment hadn’t actually taken any losses. Their vehicles were still careering around the Plaza dodging debris as it fell from the sky, and powering away from impact sites. Individual troops were more vulnerable, having to run and jump without any guidance other than looking up—this while maintaining their aggressive firing. So far none of the blimpbots had got near the gateway. A protective ring of Cruisers had drawn up around it, with more skidding into place. The trucks were taking cover in the bigger warehouses and archways along the base of Market Wall.

The firepower from the ground was intense, matching the deluge of flares in lambency. To anyone standing in the middle of the Plaza, the rain clouds were almost obliterated from view behind swirls of light and clots of darkness. Into this balletic graveyard of goliath craft, blimpbot number five arrived at high speed, rushing over Market Wall. Seven, eight, and nine were already drawing fire from the top of Market Wall as they sped inward.

“There are bombs in five and eight,” Stig said. He pumped his force field up to full strength, and wrapped his arms over his head. “Keely, crash the city net.”

Blimpbot five had hauled two-thirds of its length over the Plaza when the big cylinder dropped out of its front cargo bay, almost unnoticed in the antagonistic environment that the decoy dispensers had created. It tumbled down for a couple of seconds until it was below the lip of Market Wall, then an explosive charge inside detonated. The cylinder disappeared inside a dense vapor burst of ethylene oxide that looked like a bloated smoke cloud. A second, larger explosion was triggered by the bomb’s control array, igniting the cloud.

The fuel-air fireball produced a blast overpressure only slightly less than that of a nuclear weapon.

Stig saw it. He had his eyes closed, and his virtual vision on medium brightness, but the flash still penetrated his eyelids. It corresponded to every sneekbot image vanishing. Several seconds later the sound wave crashed overhead. His arms tightened up as the concrete wall shook.

When he looked up the sky was dark again, though the rain had gone. He could see curious smears high overhead. Small veiled shapes cruised through the night, as if a flock of bats were fleeing the scene. There were no bats on Far Away. When he stood up he could see a seething column of luminous air swelling upward from the direction of First Foot Fall Plaza. He realized he’d lost contact with half of the blimpbots in the second wave. A couple that did respond were recording zero altitude with their helium cells leaking prodigiously.

“Let’s go,” he shouted at Olwen. They ran for an exit. “Keely, I need a sneekbot view of 3F.”

“Doing my best. Dreaming heavens, did that ever work better than we expected.”

Stig reached the stairs up to street level. He came out on the corner of Nottingham Road just as the rain began to sweep back again. His peripheral vision caught something falling above the nearby terrace of houses, something impossibly big, so he turned—“Holy shit!” He flung his arm around Olwen and carried her down to the pavement.

The mangled rear third of a blimpbot sank silently out of the night to smash into the houses, pulverizing the three directly underneath it. So where’s the rest of it? Fragmented solar panels, smashed timbers, slates, and long splinters of glass tumbled out of the collapsing rubble to skitter across the road.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Sure, still had my force field on.”

He looked at the fist-sized chunks of stone and jagged struts from the blimpbot’s geodesic structure that were scattered around them. They’d been lucky nothing larger had landed near them. He could hear screaming, shouts for help rising in the background.

“We can’t stop for them,” he said.

Olwen gave a shaky nod. “Yeah.”

They started off down Nottingham Road. Images were flicking back up into his virtual vision grid as Keely activated the second wave of sneekbots she had stowed around 3F Plaza. No matter which ones he pulled out of the grid, all he saw was the rubble they were crawling over.

Six blimpbots had survived. Their status reports were organizing themselves inside his virtual vision. One was effectively dead in the air, unable to move other than where the wind took it. The remaining five had all sustained a lot of damage, but they were mobile, and one of them was a bomb carrier. “Bingo,” he muttered. “We might be able to do it again.”

They reached a crossroads, and looked along Levana Walk, which gave them a clear view to First Foot Fall Plaza nearly a half kilometer away. As Stig intended, Market Wall had deflected the main blast wave upward, away from the nearby buildings. It hadn’t been enough to save the smaller houses in surrounding streets, which had collapsed; even the larger, sturdier blocks directly outside the Plaza had taken considerable damage. Fires were starting to root, burning fiercely amid the wreckage. Market Wall itself was now a thick stone circle of rubble, only two-thirds of its original imposing height.

Stig drew in his breath at the sight of it. “It held,” he murmured. “Thank the dreaming heavens, it held.” He hadn’t wanted to consider the devastation a fuel air bomb would cause if its blast wave had been allowed to spread out horizontally.

“You can’t let off another one,” Olwen said. She stood in the center of the crossroads, looking down each street in turn.

“Huh?”

“Look. Look properly.”

Stig followed her gaze. There were people everywhere. Dazed, weeping, bloodied, wandering helplessly through piles of wreckage, kneeling beside badly injured friends or family that’d been pulled out of broken buildings. Cars and vans were strewn across the road, none of them with any glass left intact; their alarms were all squawking furiously, lights flashing for attention, even those that had turned turtle. Rain and melted scraps of blimpbot fuselage fabric had combined into a weird sleet that was slowly and methodically smothering the bereaved landscape under an impenetrable black mantle.

He began to register the expressions around him as the damp ash pattered against his jacket. The tears, the silent rage, and the terrible anguish as people took stock of life that had been irretrievably smashed. There were hundreds just along the sections of road that he could see.

It took every shred of self-discipline he possessed to fight the guilt. “We have to,” he told her through gritted teeth. “It’ll come through unless we stop it. We don’t have anything else left to keep it away.”

“Then find something. Use us, we have weapons.”

He glanced at the ion pistol she was carrying openly, and resisted the impulse to give a derisive laugh. “Let’s assess 3F first, shall we?”

The sneekbots were scuttling their way to the top of the encircling mound that had been Market Wall. It took Stig a moment to make sense of the first images they provided. There was nothing he recognized, no features or outlines. First Foot Fall Plaza was a true crater now, and completely black on the inside where it had been scorched by the fuel air bomb. The force field over the gateway had withstood the blast; it was almost buried under fragments of roasted stone, with just a small crescent exposed, looking like milky glass as the rain washed the carbon dust away from it. None of the Institute troops had survived. He couldn’t even see any bodies. Their vehicles had vanished as well, including the MANN truck. He’d expected to see the metallic capsule lying somewhere, battered and overturned, but the sneekbots couldn’t detect any electrical or magnetic activity except for the gateway force field itself. First Foot Fall Plaza was a confirmed dead zone.

“It’s not going to come through into that,” Olwen said. “We’ve got a chance.”

“You’re probably right.” Stig checked the time in his virtual vision. “We’ve got fifty-five minutes left of this cycle,” he told everyone on the general band. “Our job is to make it as difficult as possible for the Starflyer to come through. It isn’t going to risk itself without an escort on this side, so I want Muriden’s and Hanna’s teams to dig in here on Market Wall. If anything comes through the gateway, shoot it with the plasma rifles. The rest of us: we’re splitting into mobile units. We have to prevent the Institute from getting close to 3F Plaza. Keely will update us on the location of any vehicles. If they look like they’re gathering into a convoy we hit them hard.”

It wasn’t a good omen, Wilson Kime calling over the general band that the radar had given them away, then two seconds later having to jump off the Carbon Goose’s loading ramp into pitch-darkness. Morton knew they didn’t have any choice. Options on this trip had vanished when the wormhole back to Boongate had slammed shut behind them. So he’d shouted out the obvious, and flung himself off. Didn’t bother to check if anyone agreed. Supposedly, leading by example was the sign of good leadership, except no one had ever said he was in charge.

The huge plane shot away above him, and he expanded the suit’s force field out to fifty meters. His speed braked sharply from air resistance, and he pushed the perimeter out even farther, shaping it to a teardrop profile. Sensors showed him the cold rock less than two hundred meters below, and approaching fast. They also revealed nine other armor suits dropping around him.

Thank Christ for that.

Morton had thought—sort of—that he could rely on Rob and the Cat to jump, but the others were unknowns. It was kind of reassuring that they were as committed or as reckless as he was.

The base of the force field touched the rock, bowing back up like a sponge to absorb the impact, then folded neatly back around the suit.

“Did you have an encore in mind?” the Cat asked.

“Whatever it is, he’s doing it solo,” Rob said.

“Thanks, guys.”

“Everyone okay?” Alic asked.

He got a chorus of acknowledgments. They were all down intact. The armor that the four Guardians wore was almost as good as the navy-issue marque.

“Four kilometers that way,” Morton said as they gathered together. “And thirty-two minutes left until the wormhole closes. How do you want to handle this?” The original hasty plan back in the Carbon Goose while they were suiting up was to creep up on Port Evergreen and sniper any exposed Starflyer agent, then hopefully disable the vehicles it was using before they went through the wormhole.

“Go in stealthed,” Alic said. “Take out those vehicles before they know what’s happening. It has to be in one of them.”

“No way, darling,” the Cat said. “We’re working with a badass timescale here. They know we’re here, we know they know, so we go in hot and burn the bastards down.”

“Do it,” Morton said. Once again he just set off, using the suit electromuscle to sprint hard over the land.

“One day, Morty,” the Cat said on a secure link, “we’re going to have to sort out that little ego problem of yours.”

She was level with him, then slowly pulling ahead. Morton settled for staying five meters behind her, and kept pace.

That was how the ten of them appeared on the top of the slope that led down to Port Evergreen: a line of potent electromagnetic and thermal points sliding up over the rocky horizon, unmistakable, making no attempt at concealment. They paused to assess the layout below, activating their weapons, then began the final advance down the incline.

“What is this?” the Cat sneered. “Fucking amateur night? Look at that positioning.”

Seventeen Starflyer agents were spread out in a kilometer-wide picket around the generator building. As soon as they sensed the invaders’ arrival they began to move like ants rushing to protect the nest. A dozen more hurried out of the vehicles waiting in front of the wormhole to reinforce the line. When the two sides were five hundred meters apart, they opened fire.

Plasma bolts and ion pulses slammed into Morton’s force field, ricocheting away without even straining it, their strobing brighter than any flash produced by the planet’s neutron star. The shots cast sharp, long shadows around him, swaying dizzyingly across the rock as they clashed and traversed.

“I’ll start on the right,” Rob said. “You guys keep going.” He dropped to his knee. The Starflyer agents were congregating into a pack directly ahead, with even more appearing from Port Evergreen to concentrate their firepower. Rob’s hyper-rifle rose smoothly out of its forearm sheath. The first shot cut clean through the Starflyer agent’s force field, armor, and body. Tatters of gore created a long splatter pattern on the rock.

The ease and violence of the kill shocked the other Starflyer agents. Their barrage waned for a moment, then shifted focus to target Rob.

“Little help here,” Rob said. The energy hammering against his force field was shaking him back across the rock. “Can’t get a good lock.”

“Never send a boy…” the Cat sighed. Her hyper-rifle deployed, and she took out two Starflyer agents. The rest of the pack immediately split apart with the proficiency of a dance troupe maneuver. They went for cover behind rock formations, or wormed their way along narrow clefts. Two scuttled into a pressurized hut, and resumed firing with a heavy-caliber plasma rifle. One of the Guardians was knocked back, force field alive with ruby flickers.

Alic’s particle lance swung up, and aligned on the hut. He fired. The hut detonated in a burst of silvery splinters and voracious white flame. A mushroom of black smoke boiled up into the dark sky.

“My, that’s a big one,” the Cat said. Her hyper-rifle blew a clump of boulders apart, exposing the Starflyer agent using them for cover. She fired again. “Can you hit the trucks with it?”

“This angle’s close to the generator,” Alic said. “Hang on, I’m going to circle around.”

“Ayub, Matthew, deploy around the generator,” Morton said. “Flush any hostiles out of there. We can’t afford to let them hold it.”

“I’m on it,” Ayub confirmed.

Two powerful plasma shots struck Jim Nwan from a new direction, punching him off his feet. “One of the shits is in a Carbon Goose,” he said and rolled over into a crouch. The rotary launcher on his arm let out a high-pitched whirr as the feed tube shook. Enhanced explosive mortars ripped through the Carbon Goose’s fuselage, then detonated. The giant plane disintegrated inside a huge gout of glaring electron-blue light.

“Vehicles on the move,” Matthew warned. The eight trucks were crawling forward, bunching together to combine their force fields. His sensors tracked a pair of human figures running in front of them. They went through the wormhole’s pressure curtain.

Alic’s particle lance struck the rear truck. Its force field held.

“Alic, flatten the rest of the place,” Morton said.

Another particle lance lashed out at the truck, with no effect. “The Starflyer’s in one of those trucks,” Alic said. “It has to be. We don’t have force fields that strong.”

“They’re going to go through,” Morton said. “When they do, everyone left here will try to kill the generator. Take out the huts and everything else they might shelter behind. Jim, you, too. Deny them any cover.”

“All right.”

The first truck was only a couple of meters from the wormhole, its engine revving loudly. Alic started shooting at the remaining huts, blasting them apart. Ayub and Matthew reached the generator building. There was a fast exchange of fire. Matthew released a swarm of sneekbots. Mortars whistled through the air above Port Evergreen. The second Carbon Goose exploded.

A large cylinder telescoped up out of a truck near the back of the line.

“That doesn’t look good,” the Cat warned. She fired five shots from her hyper-rifle, each one defeated by the truck’s force field as the cylinder calmly swung around inside the protective dome. “Rob, synchronize,” she yelled.

The cylinder was swinging toward the Cat. She jumped, the suit’s electromuscle powering her ten meters up into the night sky. A vivid white line scored through the air below her kicking feet, striking rock fifty meters away. The massive explosion sent a fountain of lava cascading over a huge area.

“Oh, shit,” Jim groaned. “Here we go. They’ve got real artillery.”

Morton was having trouble keeping current as events were playing out so fast. The weapon on the truck was swinging around, seeking out a new target. Three Starflyer agents stood in the door of the generator building, exchanging fire with Matthew. Someone came through the wormhole, wearing only an environment suit. Rob shot them with his hyper-rifle, sending body parts squelching back against the pressure curtain. Blood froze fast in Half Way’s atmosphere, falling to the ground in a shower of burgundy crystals. The lead truck revved hard, and lurched forward. Rob and the Cat had interfaced their hyper-rifles, and fired at the truck simultaneously. The force field flashed dangerous crimson as the twin energy beams struck it, then vanished through the wormhole.

“Bastard,” the Cat shrieked. “Morty, synchronize. Triple hit.”

The truck’s heavy-duty weapon fired again as Morton’s virtual hands flew over icons. Lava erupted where Jim had been standing. His armor suit curved gracefully through the air. Plasma pulses hit him at the top of the arc, sending him flailing backward through the sluggish jet of glowing molten rock.

Morton’s suit array interfaced with Rob and the Cat, putting his hyper-rifle under the Cat’s control. Two more trucks had slipped through the wormhole; the others were jostling for position, shoving forward.

“Which one?” the Cat demanded.

“Choose fast,” Rob replied. “Not the weapons truck.”

Morton watched targeting graphics zero in on the fifth truck. He would have gone for the one at the front, personally. The three hyper-rifles fired in unison. A scarlet corona burst across the truck’s force field. A particle lance streaked into it, and for an instant the truck was outlined in perfect clarity. It vaporized in an impressive plume of superheated gas and debris that soared above the rocky inlet. The remaining trucks rocked about wildly as the impulse pummeled their force fields. Another dashed through the wormhole.

The weapons truck braked to a halt, its deadly cylinder slewing around to point at the generator building. “Hit the fucker, Cat!” Morton yelled.

Three coincident hyper-rifle shots punctured the force field, and ignited the truck’s power cells. The explosion sent armor suits tumbling across the rock, its ferocity overwhelming all the other firefights.

Morton picked himself up. There was no more Port Evergreen. The only structure remaining was the wormhole generator. Where the huts had been, meager flames guttered in the ruptured foundations. The mounds of wreckage that had been Carbon Goose planes glowed vermilion in patches as they swiftly shed their heat into the freezing air. Rivulets of lava were running downslope to the sea where the Starflyer’s weapon had struck rock.

An ion pistol pulse struck the generator building. Four armor suits immediately fired on the Starflyer agent. Morton hurriedly focused on the building’s entrance. Last thing he remembered was two Starflyer agents in the doorway holding off Matthew. Blue-white light flared inside, a section of the wall shattered, and a broken armor suit flew out through the gash.

“Last one, I think,” Ayub said.

Morton held his breath, and focused his sensors on the wormhole. It was still open. He couldn’t bear the tension. If any Starflyer agent was left on this side, they’d destroy the generator. If there was a demolition charge planted, now was when it would go off.

The Cat moved up to stand beside him. “Eleven minutes left to the end of the cycle. Do we go through?”

“I dunno. Alic?”

“We don’t know what’s there. Matthew, send something through, grab us some data.”

“Already ahead of you, Boss.”

“Okay, everyone else, short-range sweep. We need to secure the area.”

Morton reluctantly agreed with the navy commander, and began to scan the ground where his suit array had located the last Starflyer agent.

Five sneekbots were running fast over the scorched ground in front of the generator building. They didn’t slow when they reached the pressure curtain. Morton accessed their sensor feeds as he continued his own search through various pieces of wreckage. There was a moment of fuzzy darkness, then they emerged into a universe that was strangely black. The ground was covered in soggy ash. Infrared showed something large directly ahead. A flash of light—

“They’re waiting for us,” Jim said.

“Christ, we need the armored cars for this.” Morton touched the Carbon Goose icon. “Wilson, get down here fast.”

“On my way. What’s happening?”

“We’ve secured the wormhole, but the bastard slipped through. They’re sitting on the other side, and shooting anything that sticks its head through. The armor cars should give us an edge.”

“That’s a bad timescale,” Wilson said.

“Morton,” Adam called, “even if we get the armored cars through, which will be pushing it, we’ll be in some kind of fight to clear the area. We don’t know how long that’ll take, and it’s what the Volvos are carrying that is really important here. They have to be safeguarded, and they’re simply not going to get through in the ten minutes we’ve got left.”

“If you don’t go through, you’ll be giving it a fifteen-hour head start. How long will it take to reach its ship?”

“Two to three days, depending on how badly the clan warriors damage Highway One.”

“Then you can’t afford fifteen hours.”

“I know.”

Morton’s suit sensors showed him an immobile warm patch in a slight hollow. When he inspected it, he found half an armor suit and a large rapidly cooling shale of blood crystals.

“Sending another sneekbot through,” Matthew announced.

The Carbon Goose was a pink point just above the invisible horizon, still two minutes out. Morton cursed the feeble speed of the great plane. He knew they weren’t going to get down in time. The timer in his virtual vision was counting off the seconds. There were only eight and a half minutes left now. He pulled the latest sneekbot image out of his grid. It lasted less than a second.

“What the hell is that black stuff?” Rob asked. “It’s everywhere on the other side.”

“It looks like ash to me,” Matthew said. “Something bad happened there, very bad.”

Morton finished his sweep. He watched the Carbon Goose swoop low over the water. Its nose tipped up, and the tail touched the surface. Huge fantails of foam shot out on either side and it slowly sank back level, lowering more and more of its belly into the water. He was surprised how short the landing run was.

“Morton,” Adam called, “we’re not going to send the armored cars through.”

“Damnit.” He looked at the wormhole again. The impulse to sprint straight at it was a strong one. I wonder if that’s how I felt killing Tara. Action is always the solution, it links events, carries you forward.

“There might be another way,” Adam said.

Morton switched his communications link off. “It better be good,” he muttered into the muffled silence of his helmet.

While the Carbon Goose sailed sedately toward the shelf of rock that formed Port Evergreen’s shore, Morton went and stood in front of the dull gray semicircle. The timer continued to count off seconds. It was like watching his life drain away. He was aware of three other armor suits coming up to stand beside him. They waited in silence.

We should have knocked out the generator ourselves, made the sacrifice. That would have stranded the Starflyer here. We could have killed it then. If it was in one of the trucks.

There were just so many unknowns and variables. Morton hated that.

His timer was seventeen seconds off. The wormhole closed before he expected, the slight glimmer behind the pressure curtain shrinking away unexpectedly early.

“Okay,” he told Adam. “Let’s hear it.”

It took the Institute thirty-two minutes to shoot down five of the remaining blimpbots after the fuel air bomb went off. Land Rover Cruisers tore through the streets of Armstrong City in twos and threes, never quite constituting a decent target by themselves. The teams would rendezvous in an open location where they could mass their firepower and slam it into the massive aging craft coasting above the rooftops.

It was easy enough for Keely to track them. She’d successfully crashed the city’s net, forcing the Institute to use encrypted radio. Transmission points were easy to track. Physically following them was more difficult. The streets were packed with people and vehicles, trying to get the injured to hospitals, forming rescue parties to pick through collapsed buildings. Lack of communications was a huge inhibitor. The emergency services had fallback radio, but they didn’t know where the worst areas were. It wasn’t just the district around 3F; the blimpbots that had been knocked out of the sky had caused tremendous damage where they crashed. Three of them had started street blazes.

The Institute troops didn’t care about any of the human problems. Their Cruisers drove through crowds and forced ambulances off the street; anyone who got in the way was shot at. When they did succeed in attacking a blimpbot it would fall to the ground, causing more deaths and damage.

Stig and the available clan warriors chased around after the Cruisers on bikes where they could. It was difficult, they couldn’t go plowing through crowds. They’d managed to wreck six Cruisers in total, at a cost of nine Guardians. He didn’t like the ratio.

“Convoy forming along Mantana Avenue,” Keely warned.

Stig checked his timer. There were eighteen minutes left before the wormhole closed. Above him stars were shining through the thinning rain clouds. “Okay, all mobile units, we’ll regroup at the 3F end of Levana Walk. Muriden, Hanna, slow them up as best you can. We’ll reinforce you immediately.” He braked the bike he’d commandeered, a Triumph Urban-retro45, and swung it in a sharp turn to head back down Crown Lane. Olwen, who was riding shotgun, slipped her ion pistols back into their holsters. “Did they get the bomb carrier?”

“Yeah.” He was busy concentrating on the road, which was littered with debris. Every other vehicle driving that evening was moving fast and swerving to avoid the bigger lumps and branches. It was adding a considerable percentage to the casualties.

Sensor coverage from the sneekbots was sporadic. Keely had left secure routes through the city’s network that the Guardians could access, but there had been a lot of physical damage, especially around 3F. Stig was supplied with intermittent images of the vehicles thrusting their way along Mantana Avenue. There were some kind of bulldozers near the front, and a couple of beefy tow trucks.

“Isn’t that another of those life-support capsules?” Olwen asked.

Stig risked shifting his focus from the road to his virtual vision grid, and saw an identical MANN rig to the first. “What do they do, clone those bastards?” A minibus full of injured heading the other way blasted its horn at him, and he throttled back, swaying in close to the pavement. The driver shook his fist as he passed.

“Damnit, we’re not going to be in time.” He watched the first Cruisers reach the bottom of the steep rubble slope that had been Market Wall. Their suspension had lowered, lifting the main body a couple of meters above the ground. They didn’t even seem to slow down as they tipped up and began climbing the pile.

Hanna’s team opened fire as soon as they reached the crown. Gatling cannon and masers replied. Headlights and targeting lasers lashed across the broken inner surface.

The bulldozers were going up in formation, flattening a crude road, shunting aside tons of debris with a speed Stig could hardly believe. Their brilliant headlights cut through the late twilight, illuminating thick clouds of dust they were churning up. More Range Rover Cruisers were speeding up over the broken stone and into the dark heart of the blast zone. They began firing at random out of the cloying dust, strafing the blackened slopes.

“Disengage,” Stig ordered as the tenth Cruiser topped the mound. “Fall back, dreaming heavens, you can’t hold that many.” They were even losing sneekbots as the Institute’s randomized firepower swept around the ruined Plaza.

The bulldozers had carved a roughly level path up to the top of the slope; now they were pushing down the other side. Dense streamers of dust congested the air around them, blurring the light beams. Five more Cruisers raced up after them, jumping the apex to come bouncing down the newly formed ramp. There were over twenty of the Institute vehicles inside the Plaza now, all of them shooting wildly. None of the Guardians were firing back; they were scrabbling desperately for cover. The MANN truck arrived at the bottom of the incline, and began to grind its way up, eight headlights stabbing up into the occluded night.

“We should have stayed,” Stig said. “Made our stand there around 3F.”

“We’d have been slaughtered,” Olwen said. “This is complete desperation on their part; they’ll do anything to clear a path for the Starflyer.”

He turned onto Nottingham Road and braked again. It was chaos ahead, with cars and vans wedged together, headlights shining on the partially collapsed buildings. People were working on the ruins, picking stones and bricks off one at a time. A city fire crew was deployed halfway along, their bots crawling up a four-story house that had somehow twisted itself around through twenty degrees.

“Run,” he said simply.

The Institute Cruisers stopped firing. There were only five functioning sneekbots left in 3F Plaza. They showed the MANN truck gunning its way down the inner slope in juddering bursts. Five Cruisers were shining their headlights on the gateway’s pressure curtain. A group of figures in flexarmor were clearing it, flinging away chunks of debris.

Stig’s timer said there were thirteen minutes left until the end of the cycle. For another fuel air bomb he would have signed away his soul.

One of the Institute people walked through the gateway. There were flashes of light on the other side, diffused by the pressure curtain.

Some kind of truck came crashing out through the pressure curtain in a burst of noise and light. Its force field was radiating a bright perilous red. Air brakes shrieked and hissed, tires skidded across the slippery ash. The mounted weapon on every Cruiser tracked the truck’s erratic journey until it came to a halt fifty meters from the gateway. Its engine was racing, snorting like a maddened animal as the red hue faded away. Frost began to form on its bodywork.

Two more identical trucks came racing through. Then brilliant scarlet light stabbed through the pressure curtain, illuminating half of the Plaza.

“That’s us,” Stig said. “It’s got to be. Adam’s on the other side. The Starflyer isn’t having it all its own way.”

More trucks were scurrying through, so close together they could have been a train. The Cruisers were forming a broad semicircle around the gateway, every weapon pointed at it. Stig counted eight trucks in total behind them. One was crawling forward, leveling up beside the MANN truck. “Keely, we need a better angle on that truck,” he said.

“I’ll try.”

A couple of the sneekbots began to move. The image was dreadful, jolting about, with dust and drizzle rendering zoom function difficult. A door expanded in the side of the capsule. One of the sneekbots dipped down behind some rubble. That left one. Its camera tried to focus as the back of the truck hinged down, a pale vapor drifted out to vanish amid the swirling dust.

“Dreaming fucking heavens,” Stig said hoarsely. The Starflyer! He came to a complete halt, oblivious to the turmoil around him, concentrating on the one inadequate feed. Every headlight in the Plaza abruptly switched off. The sneekbot countered the darkness by activating its image amplification mode. Something moved out of the truck’s screened interior, surrounded by smaller human figures. It vanished into the capsule and the door contracted.

Headlights came back on, washing out the sneekbot’s images.

“Can you enhance that?” Stig asked breathlessly. When he replayed the image it was completely unclear, simply a patch of shaded pixels. Mobile, though. He thought it rocked as it moved.

“I dunno,” Keely replied. “I’ll shove it through the programs.”

Several Cruisers were roaring back up the path the bulldozers had cut through Market Wall. When they reached the top, they opened fire indiscriminately on the street below.

“Bastards,” Olwen exclaimed bitterly. The gunfire was audible where they were, near the end of Nottingham Road.

The MANN lorry started to move, powering its way back up the ramp, thick tires grinding the rubble flat. Cruisers formed up in front and behind it. They all started off down Mantana Avenue.

“Snipers stand by,” Stig said. “The Starflyer is on its way out of the city. Keely, alert the teams along Highway One to start wrecking the road. Did we get anyone to the Tangeat bridge?”

“No.”

He cursed under his breath, very careful not to let any hint of disapproval out into the general band. “Doesn’t matter, there’s a lot of other bridges between here and the Marie Celeste.”

Stig pulled sneekbot images out of his grid, anxious to see what was happening in 3F Plaza. Two of the trucks and seven Range Rover Cruisers had been left behind by the Institute. All of them had mounted weapons pointing at the gateway. Even as he watched, two violet lasers lashed out at some point on the ground just centimeters from the pressure curtain.

“They’re waiting to ambush Adam,” he said. “Dreaming heavens, we’ll have to eliminate them. Adam will be stranded on Far Away if we don’t.”

“We don’t have time, Stig,” Olwen said. “We have to get after the Starflyer. We can’t put together a team to get rid of those Cruisers before the end of the cycle. We can’t even get to 3F by then.”

Stig checked his timer again: seven minutes. The entire operation was fucked; totally, thoroughly, fucked. They hadn’t stopped the Starflyer. They’d killed hundreds of innocent people and wrecked a good portion of Armstrong City. And now, they couldn’t even help their comrades through the wormhole. He couldn’t bear the idea of telling Harvey that the vital equipment to complete the planet’s revenge would never be coming, that Johansson was left high and dry on Half Way, and that he was responsible for it all. Facing the ambush Cruisers single-handed would be preferable.

He realized his clenched fists had risen up of their own accord, a response to the complete futility he felt. “I’ll stay,” he said, and consciously forced his hands down again. “This is my fault. I’ll put a team together and take out the Institute ambush before the wormhole opens again. Everyone else can resume their harassment duty down Highway One.”

“No you don’t,” Olwen said. “Listen to me, and listen hard, you’re not falling back into the self-pity routine. We can’t afford that luxury. Even if we do manage to knock out the ambush, the wormhole won’t open again for another fifteen hours. The Starflyer will have an unbeatable lead by then. We’ve lost the equipment Adam’s bringing. Forget about it, Stig. If it comes through in fifteen hours, it won’t make the slightest difference, it’ll be too late. We have to take off after the Starflyer with every weapon we’ve got and run that motherfucker into the ground. We have to do that now. And you know it.”

“Yeah,” he said brokenly. “I know.”

A hundred meters from the rock shoreline, the Carbon Goose extended its undercarriage. Wilson throttled back the turbines and let the giant plane slide forward sedately through the water until its nose wheels touched the gently sloping granite shelf. They rose up out of the icy sea with that slow undulation unique to taxiing planes the galaxy over.

Flames were flickering among the debris that used to be Port Evergreen. Wilson had to steer sharply to starboard to avoid the shattered remnants of another Carbon Goose. He could see some of the armor suits moving about across the land, still checking to see if any of the Starflyer’s agents were operational. The wormhole generator building looked intact, which he took as a good sign. Adam and Paula had been working something out in the main deck. They’d sounded confident when he spoke to them just before touchdown. It wasn’t a combination he would normally put a lot of faith in, but right now he was willing to accept help from any direction.

He and Anna began powering down the flight systems, then went down to join everyone in the main deck. Morton and Alic had come back in, their suits bristling with frost. Even Tiger Pansy had come up from the main cargo deck to witness the conference. Wilson wondered just how much of their worry and nerves she was soaking up for Qatux. It wouldn’t be a difficult task; the upper deck was thick with them.

Johansson himself poured some coffee for Alic and Morton. They couldn’t sit down: the seats were too small to take their armor.

“We can go through when we want,” Adam said. “We pick our moment and ram through with the armored cars. They probably won’t even have their weapons switched on right now. The element of surprise is completely on our side.”

Morton flashed him a very skeptical look. “Go on.”

“The stormrider flies a twenty-hour ellipse through and around the Lagrange point. It spends five hours powering the wormhole while the plasma current pushes it in toward the neutron star, then fifteen hours gliding back into that original position. Right now it’s starting its return flight. All we have to do is take control of its guidance system and thrusters, and shove it back into the thick of the plasma current. It can generate enough power for us to open the wormhole.”

“But it probably won’t be able to fly back to the Lagrange point again,” Bradley said. “This will be a one-time attempt. We’ll be closing the door on Far Away until a replacement power source can be built here.”

“Given what’s happened on Boongate I hardly think that’s a consideration for us,” Adam said. “We must focus on our one opportunity to get to Far Away. This is it.”

“Good idea,” Wilson said. “Let’s do it.”

“Wait one,” Morton said. “Even if you can hack the guidance system, we still have to face the weapons on the other side. I don’t buy this bullshit about switching them off until the start of the next cycle. For a start, if they’ve got one eye open they’ll see the wormhole open up again. They’re going to know we’ll be busting our balls to find a way to open it. All they have to do is link the guns to a simple sensor. Anybody sticks their head out through the pressure curtain and zap. My suit array identified what those trucks were loaded with, you know: neutron-injected atom laser. Are you sure your armored cars can take that kind of punishment? From one shot, maybe, maybe two, I’ll even believe you if you say five. But we don’t know what the fuck else is waiting for us on the other side. They can hit us with twenty-five atom lasers simultaneously. They can even nuke us; if we open the wormhole what’s to stop them flinging a fusion bomb through at us? Sentiment? Come on, get real here. It’s over.”

“If that’s what you believe, then you’re free to take the Carbon Goose back to Shackleton,” Bradley said. “You’ll be safe over the ocean when we open the wormhole no matter what happens. But I am going back through.”

“All the Guardians are,” Adam said.

“It’s suicide!”

“It might be suicide. And that gram of doubt is all the hope we need.”

“You have a beautiful desperation about you, Bradley Johansson,” Qatux said over the general band. “It can be as powerful as base emotions in someone as compelled as you. I did not realize this before.”

Wilson couldn’t help giving Tiger Pansy a disapproving look. Childish, he knew, none of this was down to her. The woman was chewing her gum, looking almost blithely unaware of what was being discussed around her. He wondered about that; just how naïve could a porn star be?

“That sums up most of the people in this passenger deck quite neatly,” Bradley said with a forced smile.

“May I inquire why you do not move the other end of the wormhole to a location on Far Away that does not have your enemies waiting outside?”

Tiger Pansy’s expression changed to one of mild surprise. She rose from her seat, looking as though she was being prodded along by someone unsavory.

Bradley gave her a discomforted stare as she came to stand in front of him, regarding his face with intense curiosity.

“The gateway,” Bradley said hesitantly. “Er, helps anchor the end of a wormhole. It’s very, uh, difficult to hold the end open and steady, especially given the distance involved here. The processing power to alter the wormhole coordinate is simply not available at Port Evergreen.”

Tiger Pansy’s heavily mascaraed eyes blinked uncertainly; she reached up and touched her fingertips to the side of Bradley’s face, as if she was consoling a lover. The sight of the action made Wilson feel queasy; there was something disturbingly parasitic about it. Bradley didn’t flinch.

“I can perform the computations for you,” Qatux said.