The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (214 page)

“They’ve seen us,” Hywel said. “Missile flight changing course. Accelerating at twenty gees.”

“How long have we got?” Oscar asked.

“Five minutes until they reach nominal engagement distance.”

“Okay. What about the device they’ve fired into the star?”

The imagery expanded as Hywel tracked the device with as many sensors as he could. It was still accelerating into the corona at a hundred gees. A long wake of swirling plasma stretched out for thousands of kilometers behind it. Shock waves rippled away from its protective force field, creating violet circles that were immediately torn apart by the raging solar wind.

“That is a very powerful force field,” Teague said. “I’m not sure we could withstand that kind of environment. It had to be built specifically for this flight.”

“So what kind of device do you send into a star?” Hywel asked, his voice edgy.

“A bad one,” Reuben said. “And I don’t care how good its force field is, it won’t survive much longer. The coronal density is picking up, and that speed will generate impacts that could puncture anything.”

“But there’s no kind of—” Hywel began. “Oh, the fusion drive has switched off.”

Oscar watched the dark speck as it drilled through the super-velocity plasma. He realized he was holding his breath. “If it’s a quantumbuster?” he asked.

“Then we’re probably dead,” Reuben said. “But even if its force field holds out until it’s within range of the chromosphere, the effect of the blast will be minimal as far as Hanko is concerned. If you’ve got them, use them against the planet directly. Don’t screw around letting them off an AU away like this.”

Oscar waited as the device streaked downward. He wondered if he had time to update his secure store. Probably not. He’d done it this morning, and decided that he probably didn’t want to remember this time in the
Dublin
anyway. Although … should he leave his future incarnation a message from now saying he didn’t want to remember?
Stupid idea.

“Here we go,” Hywel said tersely.

Oscar was surprised to see it was the quantum signature scan that was changing. It was as if petals were unfurling from the device, giant thousand-kilometer-long ovals of altered quantum fields, overlapping and twisted. They began to rotate.

“Magnetic effect picking up,” Hywel warned.

The star’s massive flux lines were curving around the ephemeral quantum wings. Plasma followed, dragged into an elongated eddy curving around the device’s rigid wake.

“What the hell
is
that?” Dervla asked with quiet unease.

“Wilson?” Oscar asked. “Anyone from the Seattle Project got an opinion?” The quantum effect radiating out from the device was now five thousand kilometers in diameter. It began to speed up. The knot it was stirring up in the corona was visible to the
Dublin
’s heavily filtered optical sensors.

“Not yet,” Wilson replied.

“Captain,” Reuben called, “the Prime missiles are getting close. If we have to ward off some kind of energy strike from the device as well as dealing with them, we’re going to be in serious trouble.”

“Launch a countermissile salvo,” Oscar ordered. “We have to stay here and report on this.” He knew it was critical.

“One minute until it hits the upper corona,” Hywel said. “It’s having a hell of an impact on the solar wind.”

“Are you sure it can’t survive impact?”

“I don’t know. It’s changed so much, the quantum fluctuations at the core are significantly altered. I’m not sure what it is anymore.”

“What do you mean?”

“It might not qualify as pure matter anymore. That distortion is very weird. It seems to be incorporating the force field, and that quantum signature—I’ve never seen anything like it.”

When Oscar consulted the sensor projection, the device’s rotating wings were now close to seven thousand kilometers wide. The operation section’s display superimposed them on the corona as black ellipses. Plasma writhed around them, hurling off dense vortices that leaped up into space, dissipating as they rose. The scale of the effect was unnerving. “If it’s not matter, then what is it?”

“Some kind of energy nexus, I think. I’m not sure. It’s having an unusual effect on the surrounding mass properties.”

The Prime device spun down into the corona. It was like watching a comet striking the atmosphere of an H-congruous planet. The star’s million-degree outer layer ruptured in a crowned plume that rose higher than any of the prominences. Continent-sized cataracts of plasma curved back down only to be warped by the twisted magnetic flux. A secondary plume rose inside the core of the first, the cooler chromosphere matter streaking up to escape from the astonishing deformation produced by the device’s impact.

“Holy shit,” Oscar grunted.

“So what good did that do them?” Dervla complained.

“That quantum effect is still functional, and growing,” Hywel reported. “The device is agitating the corona, probably the photosphere, too. It’s big enough.”

“Holding the wound open,” Oscar muttered. The blemish on the star’s surface was apparent in just about every spectrum: quantum, magnetic, visible. “Radiation,” he said sharply. “Hywel, what’s the radiation emission like?”

“Rising, and fast. Christ. Captain, we’ve got to move, we’re directly above it.”

“I second that,” Reuben said. “One minute until missile engagement.”

“Dervla, take us a quarter of a million kilometers, up and out.”

“Aye, sir.”

The
Dublin
dropped into FTL for thirty seconds, time mostly taken up by Dervla confirming their relative position before emerging from the wormhole again.

When the ship’s sensors lined up on the strike zone, the turbulence in the corona was a tight-packed cone spewing streamers from its open crest. They could see it growing.

“The device is still active in there,” Hywel said. “Quantum fluctuations are registering at the same level as before. Magnetic activity is increasing. The damn thing is tightening the flux lines like a tourniquet.”

“Oscar,” Wilson called. “Tunde and Natasha believe we’re seeing a flare bomb at work.”

“A what?” he asked, startled. “You mean something like the one used at Far Away?”

“Could be.” Wilson’s voice was perfectly level. “The disturbance in the corona is producing a huge particle discharge, and it’s still building. The radiation is going to saturate Hanko, and we have no idea how long it will go on for. The Far Away flare lasted over a week. Oscar, the biosphere won’t survive that.”

“Oh, shit.” Despite the catastrophe facing the planet he was supposed to be defending, Oscar was trying to think how the Primes had wound up with a flare bomb. Somehow, the Starflyer must have given them the information how to build one.
Was that what the
Second Chance
dish was transmitting?

“They’re going to sterilize each of the new star systems they’re invading,” Wilson said. “We’ll be forced to evacuate forty-eight worlds.”

“And that’s just so far today,” Reuben grunted.

“What do we do?” Oscar asked. “Do Tunde and Natasha think a quantumbuster will work against the flare bomb?”

“We don’t know. But we’re going to have to find out. We want you to take the
Dublin
as close as you can to the star and fire a quantumbuster into the flare. Switch it to maximum effect radius.”

“Understood.”

“Admiral, if you use a quantumbuster against a star at that rating, you’ll just be adding to the quantity of energy it’s pumping out,” Reuben said. “It’ll make the radiation deluge even worse.”

“We understand that, Reuben,” Natasha said. “But even on maximum effect radius a quantumbuster mass to energy conversion is very short-lived, and if it knocks out the flare bomb, then only half of the planet will be subject to the radiation. We have no choice. We have to pray that this works.”

“Acknowledged.”

“All right,” Oscar said. “Reuben, arm a quantumbuster, and set it to maximum effect radius. I’m loading my authorization code now. Hywel.”

“Entered,” the first officer said.

Oscar’s virtual vision showed him a quantumbuster was now active. “Thank you. Dervla, take us in as close as you can. We don’t have much time.”

“Aye, sir.”

“We can survive for five seconds at a hundred thousand kilometers,” Teague said.

“Then that’s the distance. Let’s go, people.”

“Mark, we
really
need those flux shunt regulators integrated.” Thame was trying to keep his voice level and calm, but there was too much stress creeping in; the croak of a man who’d survived the last forty hours on no sleep and way too much caffeine. A man who was getting desperate. Not far from the
Searcher,
Prime warships were massing. A flare bomb was descending into Wessex’s star. The beginning of the end of the human race was happening right outside.

No pressure.

Mark didn’t bother answering. Didn’t dare concentrate on anything but the job. His sight was half bloodred blotches. Hands were trembling. Not that the shakes were obvious; he was in a space suit, with thick gauntlets tipped by micro-sensitive patches. The frigate assembly bay was in a vacuum. Ready to go, to send the warship out into the void where battle could be joined. Except the regulators still wouldn’t function properly. Mark was actually working on the power feed on the frame next to one of the nine units. All the high-capacity cables were locked into place on the power feed; now he was working his way down the management program registry. Lines of faint emerald text stretching higher than a skyscraper flowed through his virtual vision. He altered and modified the lines as they passed by. It was instinct only now, the echoing memory of power supply systems he’d handled in the past, simple fixes and patches stored in old insert files that he edited into the new instructions, reformatting, molding the software into something he simply felt might work.

“I’m sorry to ask, Mark, but can you give us any kind of timescale?” Nigel Sheldon asked. His voice was a lot more controlled than Thame’s, but there was a real need burning in there.

“I’m trying,” Mark whimpered. “I’M TRYING!” His vision blurred completely as tears swelled across his eyes. He blinked them away. The last few luminous green lines were running across his virtual vision. A patch he’d written to monitor feedback anticycle safety directives in Ulon Valley auto-pickers was slipped in. He could smell the moist air, the sugar scent of the vines as he told the program to run.

Something turned from red to green.

“It’s working!” Thame screamed. “Power initiation sequence enabled. Mark, you fucking did it.”

In front of Mark’s visor, red lights on the power feed casing were turning to green. A judder of relief ran down his body. His e-butler routed copies of the program into every regulator power feed on the frigate.

“Fantastic job.” Dutton-Smith patted Mark on his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

Mark didn’t move. Couldn’t. His muscles had packed up. He was curling into fetal position.

“Okay, Mark,” Dutton-Smith said kindly. He tugged his boss out of the tiny crawl space. They only just got clear as a heavy manipulator arm slid the hull section into place. Eight identical sections were being fixed by the assembly bay RI over the frigate’s other flux regulators.

Dutton-Smith clung to the gridwork as it slowly retracted from the
Charybdis,
holding Mark’s inert form away from the umbilical bridges as they telescoped back. The frigate slid past them in a smooth, aquatic motion out into open space. There was no exhaust, no crude rockets roaring flame from bell-shaped nozzles; the
Charybdis
moved by direct gravospacial manipulation. Its perfectly black bulk blotted out a few dim stars. Then it vanished.

The response of the human navy class to the start of the second incursion matched MorningLightMountain’s predictions. Their missiles and beam weapons were more than adequate to protect the planets in the star systems had it opened its wormholes in close orbit again. Instead, it sent its fleets of ships into the star systems a long way clear of the human-colonized worlds. They launched their superluminal missiles at once, but the flight time enabled MorningLightMountain to send hundreds of ships through before there was any danger of interception. When the missiles did get close, it switched the wormhole locations and sent more ships through.

With the fleet dispersal proceeding as planned, MorningLightMountain began stage two.

Wormholes opened as close as possible to the stars of each new incursion system. Strong beams of light shone back through, brightening the asteroids and equipment that orbited the interstellar wormhole at the staging post. Ships were dispatched through to the dangerous environment, forming a protective perimeter. As predicted, the humans had not thought to station any defenses around their stars.

MorningLightMountain began firing its corona-rupture machine at the forty-eight new stars. The covering ships began their interference strategy.

Only at one star, Hanko, did the humans dispatch a starship to investigate. MorningLightMountain could do nothing more now but watch and wait. The corona-rupture machines were the most heavily automated apparatus it had ever built. It would never be able to place an immotile cluster in one of the small vessels, so it had to rely on electronics, which was a point of concern.

Several rival immotiles had developed their own versions of the corona-rupture technique during the centuries before the barrier imprisoned them. None could ever test it; to do so would be to kill all Prime life on the homeworld. It had remained a theory for over a thousand years, until the imprisonment ended.

When it wiped out the other immotile groups, MorningLightMountain was
surprised
that several of them had actually built and maintained corona-rupture machines. Investigation of their dwindling thoughts showed they were concerned about its own dominance, and believed the machines to be the last deterrent. With wormholes open to other star systems, MorningLightMountain had begun a comprehensive research project, firing the different kinds of corona-rupture machines at its disposal, and observing the results, using them to refine the design. It was
gratifying
to discover its own design was among the best.