The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (127 page)

Cherenkov radiation flooded out of the fracture in spacetime five hundred kilometers from the Prime wormhole. The
Desperado
flashed out from the center of the violet radiance, traveling at one-fifth the speed of light as it struck the force field that capped the wormhole. Detonation was instantaneous, converting a high percentage of its mass directly into energy in the form of ultra-hard radiation that punctured the force field as if it were nothing more than a bubble of brittle antique glass. The Prime wormhole was left open to the full power of the new and temporary sun that had risen above Anshun.

One of the cylindrical alien flyers shot across the end of the Turquino Valley. Mark tried to chase it with the muzzle of his weapon, but it zipped behind the steep slope on the other side before he was anywhere near. A long rumble of roiling air reverberated in from the Highmarsh.

Two more flyers appeared, traveling a lot slower than the first. Mark managed to get one centered in his sights, and pressed the trigger. The flyer’s force field burned in hazy turquoise light, with small slivers of static snapping repeatedly into the ground. Liz fired her beam gun, intensifying the corona. Over on the other side of the valley, Simon fired the projectile weapon. A plume of blue fire squirted horizontally from the endangered force field, sending glowing fireballs dripping around the shaking craft. It banked abruptly and swept away out of the line of sight. Its partner raced away.

“Move!” Mark shouted.

He was racing away from the boulders, crouched low, the weapon heavy in his hands. Fifty meters ahead and slightly downslope was another clump of boulders. With his feet thudding into the spongy boltgrass, his heart hammering, and Liz whooping manically beside him, he felt himself smile stupidly. It was almost as if he was enjoying himself.

They were five meters from cover when a huge blast demolished the boulders they’d been using. He flung himself flat, his mood flipping instantly to naked fear. “Are you all right?” he yelled as the flyer’s roaring wake shook the air.

Liz raised her head. “Fuck! Yeah, baby. Come on, move it.” Chunks of hot stone and smoking earth were pattering down all around them. A wide circle of boltgrass was on fire behind, pushing out a thick, foul-smelling smoke.

He half crawled, half scrambled around the next set of boulders, and lay there panting heavily as his legs trembled. When he risked a glance backward he saw a flyer hovering motionlessly at the entrance of the valley. He knew he should be taking another shot at it, but just couldn’t bring himself to line the weapon up. As he was watching, the flyer fired at a second craft that was curving around the first mountain. It exploded with incredible violence, lighting up the whole of the Turquino Valley as its wreckage whirled out of the air.

“What …”

“Mellanie,” Liz declared. “She’s taken control of it.”

“Goddamnit.” The flyer rushed away. Seconds later the sound of explosions rattled down the narrow valley.

Mark checked the queue for the wormhole. Everyone had thrown themselves flat. “Come on,” he growled at them. “Get up, you miserable assholes. Get up! Get moving.”

They couldn’t have heard him, but the ones closest to the wormhole staggered to their feet and rushed toward it. Their desperation triggered a panic surge, with everyone hurrying forward at once. A scrum began to swell around the placid gray circle.

“Oh, brilliant,” Mark snarled. “That’s all we need.”

“They did well holding it together this long,” Liz said.

After several minutes the pushing and shoving eased up, though any pretense at a queue was abandoned. Everyone was crowding around the wormhole; with the twilight fading and the bottom of the valley almost black, they resembled bees swarming around their hive.

“Movement at the front,” Simon’s voice crackled out of the handheld array.

Armor-suited aliens were scurrying among the abandoned buses and cars. They were difficult to see among the shadows. There was no sign of the flyers. Mark checked the bustle around the wormhole. At least four hundred people remained.

“Mark?” Simon asked. “Are you ready?”

“I guess so.” Mark brought up his hunting rifle, and switched on the sight. The zigzag jam of buses appeared as neon-blue profiles against an oyster-gray ground. It was easy to see the aliens now. There were more of them than he realized, a lot more. They slid fluidly along the sides of the human vehicles, where the shadows were deepest. Weapons were swung up into open doors, or pushed through windows in the trucks as they searched for any sign of life. If they reached the head of the stream, everyone huddled around the wormhole would be a clear target. It would be a massacre.

Mark brought the rifle sight back on the lead bus, and tracked down the bodywork until he found the open hatch. It had taken him over an hour to prepare all the superconductor batteries, the manufacturers employed so many safety systems they were difficult to disengage. But eventually he’d wired them together in a single giant power circuit. The rifle sight bracketed the side of the battery. Mark fired.

The superconductor battery ruptured, discharging its energy in one massive burst. It triggered a chain reaction around the circuit. Every battery detonated in a blaze of electrons and white-hot fragments. Aliens went tumbling through the air or were pummeled into the ground, shrapnel and snapping electric flares overloading their suit force fields. Several of their own weapons exploded in turn, adding to the carnage.

Mark and Liz were running as soon as the blast began, heading farther downslope, closer to the precious wormhole. There were only about two hundred people left now, all of them hunched down in reflex at the latest outbreak of violence.

“That ought to slow them up,” Mark yelled. “We’ll get out now.” They ran past the last tumble of rocks that they’d picked out as cover. Splashing through the stream, they arrived at the back of the frantic pack of people pressing toward the wormhole. When he looked back all he could see was a red glow from the burning boltgrass around the entrance to the valley. “Simon? Simon, what’s happening?”

“Good job, Mark,” Simon’s voice came in, as calm as always. “They’re staying back. It will take them several minutes to regroup. You’ll all get through.”

Mark hung on to Liz’s hand as he pushed himself up on his toes to look over the heads in front of him. There couldn’t have been more than a hundred or so. Maybe two minutes, if one went through every second. No, surely they could squeeze through two abreast. A minute, then. Minute and a half, tops.

Daylight poured down into the Turquino Valley. Mark tipped his head back to gape up into the heavens. Far far above them, five small blue-white stars shone down with a painful strength as they grew and grew. He stared at the new phenomena as surprise gave way to a rush of fury. “Oh, come on!” he screamed at the terrible lights. His legs gave way, dropping him to his knees. Even so he raised his fists up to the new peril. “You can’t do this to us, you bastards. One minute left. One goddamn minute and I’d be out of here.” Tears began to run down his cheeks. “Bastards. You bastards.”

“Mark.” Liz was on the damp soil beside him, arms going around his quaking shoulders. “Mark, come on, baby, we’re almost there.”

“No we’re not, they’ll never let us go, never.”

“That’s not them,” Mellanie said.

“Huh?” Mark looked up. The girl was standing above him, looking at the five dazzling lights. “That’s us,” she said. “We did that.”

“Up,” Liz said, her voice hardening. “I mean it, Mark.” She gripped one shoulder and pulled. Mellanie took his other side. Between them they dragged him to his feet. The last Randtown residents were scurrying through the wormhole. Above him the new stars were diminishing. Darkness was rushing back into the valley. Mark stumbled toward the wormhole, still not quite believing, expecting the fierce blast of a laser to catch him between his shoulders.

“We’re ready for you, Simon,” Mellanie said.

“I cannot leave. This is my home. I will do what I can to thwart the monsters.”

“Simon!”

“Go. Be safe. Come back if you can.”

Mark reached the wormhole. His last sight of Elan was the abandoned MG Metrosport, and Mellanie glaring angrily down the harsh little valley. Then he was through. Safe.

MorningLightMountain’s multitude of machine-derived senses observed the quantum distortion of the last human starship returning to battle above Anshun. It readied its ships to fire missiles and beam weapons. The humans were approaching fast. They were coming close. Dangerously close—

There was no warning. No time. Raw energy punched straight through the wormhole, flowering on the other side where the generator was sited on the asteroid. The hole in spacetime closed immediately as its generator was destroyed, but not before the awesome torrent of energy released by the dying ship had poured through. Thousands of ships above the asteroid flared briefly as their hulls vaporized inside the giant geyser of radiation. Wormhole generators imploded with spasms of gravitronic twists. The entire asteroid quaked as two hundred eighty-seven collapsing wormholes wrenched at it, then shattered. Energy contained within the generators and wormholes was released in a single backlash, enhancing the already lethal deluge shining on the interstellar wormhole.

MorningLightMountain watched in
horror
as the massive wormhole linking the staging post back to its original system wavered and fluctuated. It diverted hundreds, then thousands of immotile group clusters to producing the correct command sequences that would calm and contain the instability. Slowly, the wild shivers of energy were tamed and refocused. The output from the surviving segments of the generator mechanism were remodeled to compensate.

It surveyed the wreckage of the staging post. One asteroid and its whole equipment complement were lost completely. Thousands of ships were ruined or disabled. Clusters of cargo units spun off into the void, molting chunks of equipment that effervesced from every surface. Over three thousand immotile group clusters of varying sizes were irradiated and dying. Nearly a hundred thousand motiles were dead or dying.

Everything could be replaced, and rebuilt, though such an effort would take time. Losing a quarter of its wormholes would definitely slow its original plan for expansion across the human worlds. Back in the home system, many immotile group clusters began to consider defenses against another
suicide attack
.

Meanwhile, MorningLightMountain began to realign the surviving wormhole routes to each of the twenty-three new worlds it had taken into its domain. After a while, ships flew again, carrying what remained of its supplies down to the planets. With the humans fleeing down wormholes inside their guarded cities, motiles faced little resistance in their advance across the new lands outside.

TWENTY-FIVE

As more and more time went by, so Ozzie’s confusion grew. He simply did not understand the planet they were on. For a start, the climate didn’t change, it was always the same muggy warmth with a slow breeze continually blowing in the same direction. With a tide-locked planet there should have been strong winds redistributing the heat received by the sunside to the cold of the darkside; big circulation currents that would blow perpetually around the globe, not this gentle zephyr. Of course, the island could be situated in the middle of a doldrum zone, which meant the winds were actually out there, somewhere over the perturbingly distant horizon.

Ozzie had set up small meteorological models in the handheld array, which broadly confirmed that theory. However, the modeling didn’t take into account the fact that the planet was orbiting inside a gas halo. Quite how that would affect the atmosphere close to the surface was a complete unknown. The array certainly didn’t have the kind of algorithms necessary to solve that interaction problem.

Then there was the remote gray cloud bank that was just visible squatting above the horizon. Every time they went back up the central hill to collect more wood, he checked its position. It never moved. And that was the direction from which the breeze emanated.

He also made an effort to work out the distance to the nearby islands. Using the array’s inertial guidance function he measured the sight angle from both sides of the island he was on. This rough trigonometry put the closest forty-five miles away, which made the planet improbably massive.

The gas halo itself was an even bigger enigma. He couldn’t figure out the bright specks floating around inside it. Spectrographic sensor analysis showed they were composed of water.

“Does it really matter?” Orion asked as Ozzie launched into another round of muttering about the latest batch of results from his sensors. “We know we have to get to another island to find a path out of here. So who cares what’s in the sky?”

“Yes it does matter,” Ozzie ground out. “I don’t understand how spheres of water like that form. It can’t be through droplet collision, they’re too big. Some of them are hundreds of miles across.”

“So? You said the gas halo is breathable. Why shouldn’t it have water in it?”

“That’s not the point, man. You should be asking, why is it there?”

“So why is it there?”

“I don’t fucking know!”

“It was placed there,” Tochee said through his array. “Given this whole gas halo is artificial, the builders have incorporated the water spheres for a purpose.”

“Thank you, Tochee,” Ozzie said; he turned to Orion. “And I’d like to find out what that purpose is. To do that I need some basic information.”

“Like what?” the boy asked.

“The water vapor content of the gas halo. The pressure of the gas halo. How much evaporation is going on from the water spheres. Their temperature. That kind of thing. But with this equipment, I can’t even get started.” Ozzie waved an annoyed hand at his little collection of sensors.

“But why is it important?” Orion persisted.

“Because there are a lot of forces at work here that we can’t see. If I understood more about the gas halo, I might be able to get a decent handle on this weird planet.”

“It’s just big, you said so. Bigger than Silvergalde.”

Ozzie gave up. “Yeah, man, that’s what it looks like, for sure.” He gave the sky with its multitude of glinting specks a challenging stare. “Ah, to hell with it, we’ve got more pressing problems, right?”

“The preparations are nearly complete,” the array said. “We need one more harvesting trip for the fruit.”

“Sure.” Ozzie gave their completed craft a distrustful look. When they’d set about building a boat, he’d envisaged some kind of skiff, with a smooth hull of tight-fitting planks, a curving sail, himself standing by the tiller steering them to the next island. After all, with his harmonic blade working again, carpentry should be easy; but the encyclopedia files in the array had been brief on actual shipbuilding techniques. They’d wound up with the kind of raft that looked about as buoyant as a brick.

The first day had been spent cutting down one of each of the five tree varieties that grew on the hill, which Tochee then dragged down to the beach. One by one they were pushed out to sea. Most of the palm trunks sank lower and lower in the water as they became saturated. Only one kind floated properly, the gangly trees with their long bushy gray fronds. Naturally the least common on the island.

They had devoted the next five days to felling just about the entire population growing on the hill. Ozzie and Orion took turns wielding the harmonic blade, chopping the branches from the fallen trunks, to leave relatively smooth boles that Tochee pulled down the hill.

After that stage came the rope weaving, a subject that was covered in slightly more detail by the encyclopedia files. The dried palm fronds they used were tough and sharp, and Ozzie and Orion had bleeding fingers within minutes of starting. They had to bring out the sewing kit and modify their old gloves to cope with the fronds. Even Tochee’s manipulator flesh wasn’t immune to the razorlike edges. Eventually, though, they had enough rope to lash the logs together. Three thick bundles, five-and-a-half yards long, provided the buoyancy, with a decking of more trunks at right angles holding them together. Their sail was made from the ubiquitous palm fronds woven into a square, which looked more like a piece of wicker floor matting than any recognizable fabric.

Orion thought the raft was fantastic, a genuine adventure waiting to happen. Tochee expressed its usual quiet approval for their endeavors. That just left Ozzie feeling like the one who had to tell them Father Christmas wasn’t real. He kept thinking it was something a bunch of eight-year-olds would build over a long boring summer.

Ozzie picked up his backpack, and the three of them headed back inland to look for more fruit. There were several types they’d discovered on the island, all of them found on bushes and mini-palms that grew close to the shoreline. He was soon snipping them off their stalks with his pocketknife and filling the backpack.

Orion and Tochee were rustling through the thick vegetation on either side of him. They were both excited at the prospect of leaving the island. Ozzie wished he could share their mood. Every time he gazed up at the gas halo he knew something here didn’t make sense. Why build such a phenomenal artifact, and then stick something as mundane as a planet in the middle of it? The gas halo was surely intended for life that could fly, God’s own aviary. The water spheres and Johansson’s airborne coral reefs were way stations for creatures that had no need of gravity, that lived as physically free as it was possible to do. He supposed that if the true core of the Silfen civilization had a physical location, it couldn’t have created a more appropriate home for itself.

“An entire universe that is so small, yet so large within that it can never be known,” Johansson had said of it. “A haven of mystery cloaked in the pinnacle of scientific development. How I marveled at such a paradox.”

Ozzie struggled to remember what else the man had said. Something practical, at least. But Johansson hadn’t been one to deal in specifics. Though there had been the intimation that he’d returned directly to the Commonwealth from here.

It took Ozzie about forty minutes to fill his backpack. “This ought to be enough,” he said.

“Groovy,” Orion said with a grin, biting into one of the dark purple fruits that was flavored like a mild raspberry. The thick juice dribbled over his lips, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand.

Ozzie took a moment to look at the boy. Orion was just wearing a pair of ragged shorts, cut off from an old pair of trousers. He was nothing like as skinny as when they started off down the paths too many months ago; the walking and physical work had put a lot of muscle on him. His pale skin was heavily freckled, partially sunburned, slightly tanned, and of late almost permanently dirty. Wispy hair from his first beard was curling around his chin; while his ginger hair was fizzing outward in knotted strings that were beginning to rival Ozzie’s own Afro for unruliness. In short he was becoming a proper little savage; all he needed was a spear and a loincloth and three millennia of human civilization would have passed him by completely.

My fault,
Ozzie thought guiltily,
I should have been firmer with him at the start, sent him back to Lyddington. Or failing that, insisted on some kind of schooling.

“What?” Orion asked, looking around to see what Ozzie was staring at.

“When did you wash last?”

“I had a swim this morning.”

“With soap and water.”

“There’s none left, you said it weighed too much to carry from the Ice Citadel.”

“Oh, yeah, right. What about toothgel? Have you been using any?”

“There’s only one tube left, and it’s yours. My teeth are fine. What is this?”

“We need to do something about your hair. There’s things living in it, man.”

“Speak for yourself.”

Ozzie pulled at his beard, suddenly very conscious of the example he’d been setting. “All right, tomorrow we both start getting back into the personal hygiene groove. Deal?”

“Whatever.” Orion shrugged with indifference.

Ozzie thought it was a near-perfect imitation of his own
don’t-care
gesture. “Good. Then there’s some files on the handheld array I’d like to go through with you.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Some background information,” Ozzie said vaguely. “You can read, can’t you?”

“Ozzie!”

“Okay, man, just checking. Tomorrow then, yeah?”

“We’re taking off tomorrow morning, you said.”

“I know. There’s not going to be much else to do on the raft, is there?”

Orion scratched at his hair, obviously perplexed by this new Ozzie. “Guess not.”

They’d set up camp on the beach where they built the raft. Ozzie and Orion used the tent to give themselves a degree of darkness when they wanted to sleep. The constant light didn’t seem to bother Tochee, but then the alien didn’t sleep anyway; it just rested.

When they got back, Orion set about rekindling the fire, then started cooking the fish that Tochee had caught. Ozzie went down to the water’s edge, and used the filter pump to fill up all their water pouches. The sea wasn’t particularly salty, but they certainly couldn’t drink it neat.

He started packing their things up while Orion finished cooking. The plan was simple enough. When he and the boy woke up they’d launch the raft straightaway. They had enough fruit and cured fish to last them for several days, and drinking water wasn’t a problem with the filter. Ozzie was quietly hoping all their preparations would be unneeded anyway. Even if, as he strongly suspected, their sail was next to useless, they had carved some crude oars, and Tochee could always tow them along. It surely wouldn’t take them more than a couple of days at most to reach the next island.

In the morning, he made sure Orion used some of the dwindling toothgel. Then they both set about combing knots and tangles out of their hair. Ozzie started in on his beard with his razor set—just about the only luxury item he’d hung on to. The diamond-coated blade made easy work of the growth, although he cursed the lack of a decent mirror.

“Why don’t you just use the handheld array?” Orion asked. He touched a few icons and held it up in front of Ozzie. The screen had unfolded to show the camera image directly. Ozzie’s face was magnified considerably.

“Thanks, man,” he said as he started to apply the razor again, a little bit more skillfully this time. Maybe it wouldn’t be too hard to school the boy after all.

After a quick breakfast they packed all their travel kit away in the rucksacks and various bags; then put all the food they’d gathered for the voyage into wicker baskets. All three of them lined up along the back of the raft. They’d built it a few yards from the edge of the placid water in anticipation of this moment. With Tochee in the middle, they started pushing, sliding the craft over the soft sand and down into the water. Ozzie was straining hard when the front end finally met the small wavelets lapping ashore. He almost didn’t want to watch. If the damn thing sank he didn’t have a clue what they’d do next.

The raft dipped alarmingly as its front half rode down the slope below the water, then slowly bobbed up again. Ozzie waded out to his waist, easing it forward. Tochee swam around it, then disappeared underwater. The first day on the island the big alien had surprised them with its grace in the water; it was almost as though Tochee was more at home in the sea than it was on land. Both sets of malleable flesh flattened out to form long fins that could propel it along at considerable speed, and it could hold its breath for a long time. The result was a constant supply of local fish that it had chased down and caught for them

Orion stood with the water over his knees, grinning proudly at the raft. “Isn’t that amazing, Ozzie?”

“Yeah, man, goddamn amazing.” Ozzie watched their craft for a while longer, still expecting it to sink. It wasn’t quite as high above the water as he would have liked, and it was going to be really low when they loaded it up. But it floated …

Twenty-two yards away, Tochee flew out of the water and half rolled in the air before splashing down amid a huge burst of spray.

“Guess it approves,” Ozzie muttered. He walked back out of the water holding on to the painter, and wrapped it around a stake they’d hammered into the sand beside the pile of their belongings. “Come on, man, let’s get it loaded up.”

Orion waded out of the water. “Ozzie, what are we going to call it?”

“Huh?”

“The raft? What are we going to call it? Every boat has to have a name.”

Ozzie opened his mouth.
The Sheer Desperation
?
Titanic II
? Orion was waiting, looking at him with that naive expectancy of his; and they’d spent days of hard, painful labor building the damn thing. “I’m not sure,” Ozzie said. “How about
Pathfinder
?”

“Gosh, that’s really good, Ozzie. I like it.” He bowed at the raft. “I name this ship the
Pathfinder
, God bless her and all who sail on her.”