The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (119 page)

Nigel Sheldon had been taking breakfast in his New Costa mansion when the alert from the navy detector network came through. He hadn’t been back to Cressat, his family’s private world, for the last five months; he’d spent his time between Augusta and Earth. It was prudent, he felt, not to be too remote should anything happen, even with the blessing of modern communications. And now he was being proved terribly right.

Shielding sprang up around the mansion; communications shifted to secure links. He closed his eyes and relaxed back into the chair as the mansion’s internal shields came on, isolating the rooms. The full range of his interface inserts went on-line, allowing his sensorium to absorb digital data at an accelerated rate. Combat aerobots launched from bases dotted around the outskirts of New Costa. Startled residents gaped up into the bright morning sky to see the dark shapes roaring upward to their high-altitude patrol stations. Force fields closed off the sky behind them.

With Augusta’s defenses activated, Nigel switched his attention back to the attack. His enhanced display showed the twenty-three Commonwealth planets where the alien wormholes intruded; the wormholes themselves manifested as tactile sensations, like pinpricks across his skin. The SI responded to his request and joined him inside the tactical simulacrum, a small ball of knotted tangerine and turquoise lines fluctuating rhythmically as they floated in the nothingness beside him.

“That’s a lot of wormholes,” he said.

“Dimitri Leopoldovich always said the assault would be conducted on a large scale. This probably does not represent their full capability.”

There was a background whisper in Nigel’s greatly expanded perception as he registered the flurry of orders slipping out from the navy’s headquarters on the High Angel, coordinating sensor data and marshaling what resources they had. “Poor old Wilson,” he murmured. He concentrated on several icons in a small galaxy of symbols that were hovering in the background. They moved obediently. Using the deep connections wetwired into his brain, this interface felt more like telepathy than the simple virtual-hands array of standard domestic interface programs.

Force fields came on around every CST planetary station in the Commonwealth. On the twenty-three worlds under attack, there was almost no warning. Local trains coming into the stations braked sharply, their engines skidding along the tracks, as they approached the implacable translucent barriers that had risen in front of them. Not all of them managed to halt in time. Several engines hit the force fields and jumped the tracks, slewing around; carriages and wagons jackknifed, crunching into each other, smashing apart, crumpling up, flinging passengers and goods across embankments and cuttings. Cars and trucks arriving along the highways were ordered to brake by traffic route management software. Lead vehicles rammed the force fields; pileups dominoed back down the roads.

Information on damage and casualties slipped into Nigel’s mind. Nothing compared to the destruction pouring down out of the sky all around them. He ignored the figures. There had been no choice; without the stations and their precious gateways there would be no Commonwealth.

The remaining stations across the Commonwealth at least allowed arriving trains over the perimeter before their force fields went up. On the highways outside, huge queues formed along every carriageway, trailing back for kilometers. Those people trapped on the inside settled down for a long wait, quietly thankful about which side of the force field they were on.

Nigel saw city force fields power up as Rafael started to use the navy’s new planetary defense network, overriding local civil authorities. He sent combat aerobots rocketing skyward, firing as they went: big machines of unmistakable military ugliness. Prime projectiles were blown out of the stratosphere as they descended. But the sheer quantity of projectiles allowed several to slip through to pound at the force fields. Large areas of the surrounding countryside were flattened or reduced to lakes of glass, but the force fields held.

The CST station on Wessex actually beat the navy’s detector network in alerting Nigel to the wormholes opening above that planet. When he switched his attention there he was immediately aware of Alan Hutchinson’s command programs flooding through the Wessex cybersphere as the founder of that particular Big15 world took charge of its defenses. Multiple force fields came on around Narrabri, its megacity. The planet’s small tactical defense brigade was ordered to deploy around the perimeter, activating their ground-to-air interceptor batteries. Squadrons of combat aerobots launched from their silos to patrol the skies above the force fields.

Alan Hutchinson’s face flittered across Nigel’s consciousness, grinning savagely. Three of his aerobots fired their atom lasers, taking out incoming Prime projectiles as they hit the upper atmosphere.

“Good shooting,” Nigel said.

“Makes a decent change from finance reports,” was the gruff Aussie’s hearty comment.

Another salvo of projectiles shot out of four wormholes. They were answered by a battery of firepower from the planet below.

“Thank Christ for that,” Alan said as molten radioactive debris scudded down across the ocean. “We can hit back at the bastards.” Data coming back from the other afflicted Commonwealth worlds was depressing. Other than cities protected by force fields and aerobots, they were woefully unprepared.

“You can knock out a few missiles,” Nigel said. “But at this rate we’re going to lose. They have a thousand times our resources.”

“Well give me the good news, why don’t you.”

Both of them paused to observe the
Second Chance
fly into action above Anshun.

“Go, Tu Lee, go,” Nigel whispered out loud. He tried to suppress the anxiety he felt for his young descendant. Emotional distraction was the one thing he couldn’t afford right now.

Hundreds more projectiles were fired down at Wessex. Alan didn’t have enough aerobots to cover the more remote areas. Towns scattered across the continent-wide farmlands were wiped out as the Prime projectiles fell freely. “Motherfuckers,” Alan growled. “What threat did those people ever make?”

“Can you see an attack pattern in this?” Nigel asked the SI. “Is there a strategy? Or are they just trying to wipe us out?”

“The planets selected imply a double target approach,” the SI said. “The twenty-three outer worlds are a strong foothold into the Commonwealth. The acquisition of Wessex, with its gateways to phase two space planets, would allow them to occupy a huge proportion of territory, effectively eliminating the Commonwealth as a single entity, especially if they managed to occupy Earth as well.”

“They’ll never get the Narrabri station,” Nigel said harshly. “I’ll make quite sure of that.”

“They can’t know our exact response,” the SI said. “This is as exploratory for them as it is for us. The goal of securing Wessex is a logical one. They can afford to lose the venture, yet if they do obtain the gateways at Narrabri station they will have a back door into sixty developed worlds.”

“What the hell for? What do they want with us?”

“Judging by the projectile targets, we would infer they want to obtain as much human infrastructure as is practical. They are happy to eliminate the smaller civic areas to earn the larger ones. Even if they were to be repelled immediately, most of the surviving population from the twenty-three worlds under attack would have to be evacuated. The land around the cities is radioactive slag, crops are ruined, the climate has been disrupted. They are in danger of losing their H-congruous status without a huge amount of very expensive retro-forming.”

“Son of a bitch,” Nigel grunted. “You’re talking genocide.”

“Possibly.”

“Oh, Christ,” Alan exclaimed. “They’ve got her.”

Nigel watched with radar and optical sensors as the
Second Chance
valiantly accelerated out of orbit, struggling to shake off the surrounding Prime wormholes. Then the starship’s brilliant plasma rockets were extinguished behind a nuclear furnace of elementary particles that inflated out across five hundred kilometers.

“Son of a bitch,” Nigel barked.
Tu Lee, you did a magnificent job. I’m so proud. And I will hear your laugh again.

“Goddamn,” Alan said. “I’m sorry, Nigel.”

“We can’t just sit here and take this kind of punishment,” Nigel said. “We have to show them we can fight back.”

“Admiral Kime has ordered the warships to rendezvous,” the SI said.

“I bet those alien bastards are quaking in their fucking boots. Whoa, three ships are heading their way.”

Wessex aerobots destroyed another salvo of projectiles. The Primes seemed to have stopped targeting the small towns dotted over the rest of the planet. Narrabri and its external districts were on the receiving end of just about every deluge now.

“You are not getting my station,” Nigel told them uncompromisingly. He opened a multitude of command links directly into the wormhole generator machinery of three gateways in Narrabri’s station. His secure memory store was accessed, the old memories rising out to occupy an artificial neural network, giving him all the knowledge he ever had of exotic matter, energy inverters, supergeometry, quantum math. He drew on it all, loading new directives into the machinery that generated wormholes leading to Louisiade, Malaita, and Tubuai.

Limiters and feedback dampers flashed alerts at him. Not even his control system could handle three wormholes simultaneously.

“Could use a little help here,” he told the SI.

“Very well.”

Nigel let out a small breath of relief. You never could tell when the SI was going to pitch in, or whether it would stand aloof. He guessed this invasion might actually have flustered even the great artificial intelligence. After all Vinmar was physically inside Commonwealth space.

With the SI acting as interpreter and actuator, Nigel’s role was elevated to executive only. Under his direction the SI reformatted the internal quantum structure of the three wormholes he’d designated. He retracted the exits from their distant gateways, turning them into open-ended fissures twisting through spacetime.

One of the Prime wormholes reemerged above Wessex, and Nigel struck, his pseudotelekinetic control moving icons at supersonic speed. The three CST wormhole exits materialized inside the interloper in a transdimensional intersection, creating a massive distortion that instigated huge oscillations along the alien wormhole’s energistic fabric. Power from eight of Narrabri’s nuclear power stations was pumped through the gateway machinery to amplify the instability, forcing it back toward the Prime end.

The intrusive wormhole vanished in a severe gravitational implosion, releasing a burst of ultra-hard radiation. Nigel waited, hysradar scanning space above Wessex. The Primes were down to forty-seven wormholes jumping in and out of existence. Cautions from the Malaita gateway sounded loudly, warning him that the whole machine was powering down to prevent any further damage; the excessive power loadings he’d forced through had burned out a lot of components.

“It worked,” he proclaimed.

“Of course,” the SI replied equitably.

“Can you take out the rest?” Alan asked.

“Let’s find out.”

As far as such a thing were possible, MorningLightMountain experienced a brief feeling of trepidation as it arranged its thoughts prior to launching the expansion. The alien Commonwealth was a considerable unknown, despite the Bose memories. It remembered living there, remembered what the society was like, but had only vague notions of its true industrial and military capabilities. That gave cause for concern.

There were several other stars close to its home system that had planets capable of supporting Prime life. It had already opened wormholes to eight of them, sending hundreds of millions of motiles through to begin settlements. Life-sustaining planets were much simpler to spread across than the cold, airless moons and dead asteroids of its home system. They didn’t require machines to cocoon the new settlements in a protective friendly environment. They were cheaper to establish. Already immotile groupings were amalgamating on the new planets, integrating with MorningLightMountain’s main thought routines. In a heady taste of the future, it had now spread out to exist across hundreds of light-years.

At one time that might have been sufficient. Even the first great enemy, the unknown, would have trouble constructing barriers around so many stars. But there was more than one enemy in the galaxy. It could see what would happen when its expansion ran into the obstacle of the humans and their territory. Two incompatible life-forms competing for the same planets and stars.

MorningLightMountain knew they could not coexist in a peaceful fashion. In fact, it didn’t see how ultimately it could allow any other alien to share this galaxy, there were after all only a finite number of stars. Now that it knew how, it could join every one via wormholes, it could become omnipresent. That way it could guarantee its immortality. No matter how many stars died or turned nova, it would still be alive. And the first obstacle to that was the Commonwealth, full of dangerous independent humans and their superb advanced machinery.

MorningLightMountain opened eleven hundred four wormholes, aiming at the stellar coordinates that had come from the Bose memories. Some emerged very close to their targets, others were nearby, several were half a light-year or more distant. Sensors were pushed through, collecting positional data; the information was used to refine its star chart, locking the Commonwealth stars to precise locations. The wormhole exits were realigned around its initial target planets. MorningLightMountain was interested that the Bose memories were right about the human colonization patterns; the species grossly underused the worlds they settled. Their total numbers would barely be sufficient to fill one world, let alone hundreds. Individuality was a terrible weakness.

Bombardment projectiles were sent through, aimed at the smaller habitation zones and the perimeter of larger ones. It found other targets—the human quantum sensors, communications webs, satellites, power grids—and guided its projectiles at them. MorningLightMountain’s intention was to eliminate the humans themselves while keeping their industrial centers relatively intact. Those that survived, it wanted to drive out of their buildings and disperse ineffectually across the unused land.