The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (219 page)

“I can see foundations going in at the end of the Highmarsh,” the Cat announced. “From the look of the equipment they’ve got piled up waiting, I’d say some kind of chemical plant. Makes sense; they’re importing a hell of a lot of chemicals. Cheaper to produce them on-site.”

Cat’s Claws had watched through sensors and sneekbots as the big tanks full of toxic agricultural chemicals arrived through the gateway that MorningLightMountain had established in its new settlement a mere two kilometers along the shoreline from the radioactive hollow where their nuke had detonated. The construction had begun while they were still celebrating their success. Fusion drive ships had descended out of the sky once again, bringing a huge number of soldier motiles and their flyers. MorningLightMountain simply repeated its initial landing operation, establishing an armed camp, then putting up a force field. Inside that a wormhole gateway was constructed, industrial machinery was assembled, big power generators brought through. Roads were bulldozed between the new hub and the route around Blackwater Crag. Inside a week, its operation was the same size as before, with the one difference: its garrison of soldier motiles was four times greater. Congregation pens were built out into the waters of the Trine’ba, and a replacement refinery once more began pumping out the thick black liquid that was saturated with base cells. At which point, the Prime resumed its agricultural operations.

That was what MorningLightMountain did, the Bose motile explained. That was all it did: expand.

“How far?” Morton had asked.

“Infinite,” the Bose motile said. “Think of it as a sentient virus. It has a continuity which goes back to its evolutionary origins, possibly even before. All the Primes ever did was grow and compete against each other. Now this one has achieved total dominance, eradicating the rest of its kind, though in truth there was never much difference between them. You ask why it does this, it wouldn’t even understand the question. It
is
growth.”

After the beautiful success of wiping out Randtown, the truth had brought them down hard. Ever since, they’d performed low-level acts of sabotage, kept the survivors alive, and kept quiet about the Bose motile in their reports to the navy. Mellanie’s messages kept promising she was trying to get them off, but so far she hadn’t managed to give them a time frame. Rob was getting very antsy about that.

“Is there a force field around the foundations?” Morton asked the Cat.

“No. But there are a lot of soldier motiles stationed down there. I count sixteen flyers patrolling above it. Wait … that’s strange.”

“What’s happening?” Morton asked.

“The flyers. They’re stationary. They’re just hovering.”

“I’ve got that, too,” Rob said. “The bastards came to a full stop. Why would they do that?”

Morton looked along the shore of the Trine’ba toward the new Prime settlement. The cloud base was scudding low over the water as it always did these days. Sheet lightning flickered through the bulbous underbelly over toward the invisible southern shore, with the odd rumble of accompanying thunder echoing around the surrounding mountains. The lake itself was dying. Fusion fire from the ships and the base cell pollution had finally killed off the delicate unique ecology. Dead fish floated on the surface, their rotting bodies sticking together to form large mats of putrefying gray flesh. Underneath them, the lifeless coral was slowly decaying, producing a dank scum that washed up on the shore to form fizzing dunes of thick umber bubbles.

Flyers were constantly in the air above the desolate lake, circling around the shore in search of any hostile activity, and keeping the land around the force field under constant observation. MorningLightMountain usually had at least sixteen on patrol at any one time. This morning, there were twenty. Now, Morton couldn’t see one of them moving. Their force fields were on, their engine exhausts rotated to the vertical position.

“Motiles are stationary as well,” Rob said. There was a worried edge to his voice. “Shit, that’s spooky. They’re just standing there. Even the soldiers.”

Morton’s virtual hand touched a communications icon. “Simon, what’s the Bose motile doing?”

“Dudley is fine. Nothing wrong.”

Morton manipulated his communications icons to give him a direct link to the Bose motile. “Something is happening out here. All the motiles have frozen.”

“I don’t know why. The only reason they have for doing anything is that’s what they’ve been ordered to do.”

Morton used his suit’s electromagnetic sensors to sweep the bands that MorningLightMountain employed. The alien’s signal traffic had dropped to about ten percent of normal. “Hang on, I’m going to patch you in to what it’s saying. Tell me what you can.” His virtual hands routed the sensor reception into the link. He didn’t like exposing the Bose motile to the Prime communications. None of them were sure if MorningLightMountain would be able to move the motile around as if it were just another of its puppets. There was absolutely no way they could ever confirm the story that the Bose motile was telling them, either, though Morton suspected it was true. As a precaution, they’d agreed it should be isolated from all Prime communications. This was a justifiable exception, he felt.

“Oh, Christ,” the Bose motile said.

“What?” the Cat asked.

“MorningLightMountain has launched another invasion into the Commonwealth. It’s using something called corona-rupture bombs against our stars. We’ve got a superbomb of our own, which can knock them out, but that only makes the radiation spillage even worse.”

“Is that why they’ve all stopped? Is it concentrating on the invasion?”

“No. One of our ships has got through to the staging post star. It fired something into the star which … Oh. The destruction is enormous. MorningLightMountain is losing all its magflux extractors. Wormholes shutting down. The one into the Trine’ba settlement is gone. Its local group clusters are having to maintain contact through a wormhole in orbit. I don’t understand what we did to the staging post star. Surely—My God, it’s going nova. We triggered a nova! Nothing will survive. It only has minutes left.”

“Ye-hay! We killed it?” the Cat asked.

“The staging post, yes,” the Bose motile replied. “All the wormhole generators leading into the Commonwealth will vanish.”

“So we’ve won?”

“The invasion has been halted. MorningLightMountain still exists. As does the generator for the interstellar wormhole. This is not good. It now sees humans as a very real and immediate danger to its continued existence.”

“But it’s got to realize that if it attacks us again, we can wipe it out completely,” Rob said. “It’s not stupid.”

“No, it isn’t,” the Bose motile said. “Nor is it reasonable and open to negotiation as a human would be at this point. I’m not sure we did the right thing, though I admit I don’t see an alternative.”

“We can turn stars nova.” There was a trill of admiration in the Cat’s voice. “How wonderful.”

“The navy will need to do it to Dyson Alpha now,” Morton said. “That’s the only solution left to us.”

“Go, Navy!” Rob shouted.

“Here it comes,” the Bose motile said. “I can see the light growing. The radiation is reaching the staging post itself. MorningLightMountain is withdrawing the interstellar wormhole. All remaining wormholes are gone.”

Morton turned his attention back to the flyers hovering above the Trine’ba. They were holding steady. Prime signal traffic was almost nonexistent. “What are the immotiles it left behind going to do?”

“I’m not sure,” the Bose motile said. “All the immotiles are independent again. For the moment they’re unified copies of MorningLightMountain, but that won’t last. They’ll revert to autonomy, and try to carve themselves territories. Those on the ground will make alliances with the groups that control the big lander ships.”

“Will they fight among themselves?” Simon asked hopefully.

“Not for centuries,” the Bose motile said. “They occupy a lot of territory; there is no need to compete for a long time. But this is assuming the Commonwealth allows them to grow in the Lost23 systems.”

“That won’t happen,” Morton said. “We’ll probably be withdrawn, and they’ll nova the stars.”

“That is inadvisable,” the Bose motile said. “The radiation which novas release can quite easily sterilize all life on neighboring star systems. You’d wipe out this whole section of the Commonwealth.”

“Who gives a shit about details?” Rob said. “We can win. The immotiles left behind can be wiped out one at a time while we whack MorningLightMountain on its home star.”

“The remaining immotiles still present a formidable force,” the Bose motile said. “They have thousands of ships and several wormhole generators remaining in the Lost23 systems. They will probably seek to move beyond human reach.”

“None of this affects us,” Morton said. “All we have to worry about for now is how the local boys react. Any clues on that yet?” As he spoke, he saw the flyers moving again. They were all heading back toward the force field.

“The local immotiles are agreeing to cooperate, and remain linked into a group cluster. Without the supply route to Dyson Alpha, all expansion of existing operations will cease. They will concentrate their resources on strengthening their border against any assaults you make, and from any navy bombardment. Communications will be resumed with the other groups and clusters on Elan to decide what to do. It will mainly depend on what action the Commonwealth takes against them.”

“We should find that out soon enough. The next wormhole communication is scheduled for seven hours’ time.”

“They’ll take us home,” Rob declared. “There’s no point to all this sabotage bull when you can wipe out entire stars. How about that? Home free. And we didn’t spend half the time they threatened us with.”

“Home free?” the Cat asked sweetly. “So how exactly were you thinking of explaining why we’ve held on to our version of Dudley?”

“Shit!”

Morton watched Rob’s blue icon change to amber as he switched to a secure encrypted channel.

“Morton, you’ve got to think of some way to square that with the navy. Maybe just leave it here and pretend nothing happened. The survivors owe us big time, they won’t rat us out.”

“Could be. I want to hear what Mellanie says in the next message.”

“Goddamn,” Rob swore. “You are so pussy-whipped. Well, you make it clear to that little witch I’m not going to let her and her conspiracy theories stand between me and my clean record. That applies to you and the psycho bitch as well. When the navy lifts us, I want my release. I’ve fucking earned it.”

Niall Swalt had been cycling to work at the Grand Triad Adventures office when the Prime attack started. He still came in every day, even though the tour operator hadn’t seen a single client since Mellanie returned from her short vacation. For some reason, head office on Wessex hadn’t canceled his employment contract. Every Friday night their accountancy program paid his wages; so every Monday morning he arrived back at the office for another week of doing whatever he wanted on company time. That was mainly accessing TSIs. He went through
Murderous Seduction
at least once a week.

It was the silence he noticed as he cycled along the last stretch of road toward the employee gate. With the office sitting on the end of the CST station’s main terminal, he was used to the constant mumble of the crowd that besieged the main entrance. According to local news shows, over a third of Boongate’s population had now left, with everyone else anxious to join them. Niall wasn’t so sure about the official numbers; he thought it was more than that. Every day he cycled to work from his two-room flat, going the long way around the massive station yard. That way he didn’t get caught up in the huge jam of people arriving on the highway. There were so many cars driven into the verges along the approach roads that the government employed seventeen crews towing the abandoned vehicles away, not that they could keep up. It wasn’t just the sides of the highway that were clogged, of course. A lot of people drove through the same maze of streets he used in the commercial district surrounding the station, and parked on any clear spot before walking around to the front. Some mornings he’d find hundreds of cars had appeared overnight, turning the roads into quite an obstacle course for him to weave his way around.

Anyone who arrived and dumped their car then had a wait of nearly two days as the massive throng of people slowly shuffled their way forward toward the haven of the terminal’s main entrance. Niall didn’t know how many people there were between the highway and the entrance; it looked like the entire population to him. They wore expensive semiorganic coats, or draped plastic sheets around their shoulders to protect themselves from the miserable rain of Boongate’s early winter months. There had been plenty of days when Niall turned up and it had been sleeting. Once it snowed for thirty-six hours. It subdued the crowd, made them miserable, made them bad tempered, but nothing had ever made them fall silent before.

Niall was only three hundred meters away from the employees’ gate when he realized the sound was missing; most days you could hear it over a kilometer away. He steered around a big Toyota ten-seater Lison that was parked across a warehouse delivery bay, and braked to a halt. When he pushed his goggles up, he found it had stopped raining. Good news, yes, but not enough to stop that constant growl of barely restrained anger. He looked up. The force field had come on over the city; dark clouds slithered around its shimmering surface. A second force field was covering the station, deflecting the mists that were trapped under the city’s dome. “Oh, hell,” he whispered in fright. He’d never allowed himself to believe that the aliens would return.

His e-butler’s news filter let through an alert telling him that wormholes were being detected in a lot of star systems across the Commonwealth. His instant response was to glance over at the giant terminal building with its long, curved glass roofs. Instinctive self-preservation kicked in, and he started to work out routes in his mind. As an employee, he had access to several restricted zones inside the station complex; there were a number of ways he could reach the platforms without ever having to join that horde outside.

He let go of the brakes, and began pedaling again. Today, there were eight guards outside the employee gate, all dressed in flexarmor and carrying weapons. Normally, there were just two security staff inside their cabin, who always waved him on when he showed his company pass. This time they made Niall put his palm on a sensor pad one of them was carrying to check his biometric pattern.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” the guard snarled from inside his helmet. “A tour company rep?”

“We’re still active,” Niall protested. “It’s genuine. Check my record; I’ve been in every day for weeks. I’ve got groups left on Far Away that are coming back. Somebody’s got to be here for them.”

“I’ve got news for you, sonny, they ain’t going to make it. Look around you.”

“And if they do?”

There was a long pause while the guard referred back to his superior. “Okay,” he said eventually. “You can go through.”

“Thanks.”

The reinforced barrier across the pavement swiveled up. Niall pushed his bicycle through, feeling his skin tingle as he went through the force field. Just as he was mounting up on the other side, the guard said, “Son, if you’ve got any sense at all, you’ll go straight to the platforms and catch a train to Gralmond or one of its neighbors.”

“If my group comes back, I’ll do it.”

Not even the thick armor could mask the man shaking his head.

Niall pedaled as fast as he could to the office. His e-butler was supplying situation updates the whole way. Alien ships were pouring into the Boongate system, out around the third gas-giant orbit. Thousands more were emerging in other systems. Local news told him that the wormhole to Wessex had been temporarily closed by CST. “Hellfire.” There’d be a riot. He knew there would be.

When he got to the office he wheeled his bike in through the reception area and parked it against the counter. There was a bag he kept in the back with some spare clothes. He fetched it out, and looked around the small room. Grand Triad Adventures had a floor safe to keep the petty cash and various travel vouchers. Mr. Spanton, the manager, had granted Niall’s biometric print a temporary access authority when he went “on holiday” right after the first Prime attack. Niall put his hand on the lock pad, and internal malmetal bands pushed the door up. The cash was all piled in different currencies. He didn’t bother with anything from Boongate or the neighboring stars, figuring those Treasuries wouldn’t be able to back the national currency for much longer. Out of the money that came from planets farther from this new attack, he had roughly fifteen thousand Earth dollars’ worth. He stuffed it into his jacket pockets and turned to the office array that had a direct link to the CST ticket and travel information system. Surprisingly, his access authority still got him in; not that there was much information available. Wessex seemed to have closed half of its wormholes to traffic, and there were heavy restrictions on the remainder. There was no indication when they would open again.

Only if the navy fights off this invasion,
Niall thought. But if by some miracle it did, he was going to be ready. He used the Grand Triad Adventures account to buy a first-class ticket to Gralmond, just like the guard suggested. It was four hundred fifty light-years away, right across the other side of the Commonwealth, about as far away from Boongate as it was physically possible to go. He held his breath as the CST system processed the application, but after a few seconds it assigned his identity tattoo with the first-class ticket.

Someone knocked on the office door. Niall jumped, mostly from guilt. There was a man standing outside. Tall and quite handsome, with floppy blond hair. The type of guy who played a lot of sports; certainly his square-shouldered build put Niall’s rather more flabby frame to shame. He was talking, jabbing a finger at something in the office.

“Sorry.” Niall tapped his ear, and put his hand on the door’s lock pad. “Couldn’t hear you,” he said as the door opened.

“Thanks for letting me in,” the man said. His voice had a distinctive Earth-American twang.

“We’re not busy.”
That was a dumb thing to say.
Niall wanted to look at the door leading to the back room; he was pretty sure the man wouldn’t be able to see the open floor safe.

“I need some help. Ah … I don’t know your name.” His grin was the kind that took you straight into his confidence.

“Niall. What kind of help?”

“It’s like this, Niall. Some friends of mine have been stuck on Far Away for a while, but they’ve just sent me a message saying that they’ve managed to get off. They’re on their way back. How’s that for god-awful fucking luck. Coming back into the middle of an alien invasion. Anyway, I need to get out to the platform and meet them. Once we’re all together again then we’ll try to get off Boongate.”

“There aren’t any trains off Boongate right now. I was just checking that.”

“I know, but they’ll start up again as soon as the invasion is over. I’m not worried about that. My problem is my friends; I can’t let them down. Can you take me over to the Half Way wormhole gateway? I’d go by myself, but there are a lot of security systems around it; I’m worried I’ll never be allowed through to meet them what with everyone being so jumpy right now. They’ll get back and be stuck here. That would be serious bad news for all of us. If it helps, I can make it worth your while. Seriously worth your while.”

Niall liked the guy even more; he was obviously a regular dude, and rich, too. Everyone who went to Far Away was rich. And he was right about security: look at what happened at the employee gate this morning. Niall could come out of this very well if he played his cards right, maybe add a couple of grand to his newfound wealth. “Well, yeah, the company Mercedes is authorized to go right out to the Far Away transit area. I can take you through, no sweat.”

The man’s confident grin became even wider. “That’s what I wanted to hear.”

Hoshe had just reached the London office when the Prime attack began. Vast force fields came on over the ancient city, turning the sky a murky gray. Looking out over the Thames he saw the dark shapes of aerobots rising from their silos. They were bigger than any flying machine he’d ever seen before.

His e-butler told him Inima was calling.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah, I’m at the office. What about you?”

“We’re safe here, aren’t we, Hoshe?”

“Safest place in the Commonwealth, I promise. Shall I come home?”

“No. You stay there. I don’t want you worrying about me.”

“I don’t worry. I love you. I’m leaving now.”

“No, Hoshe. I’ve got the news summary in my virtual vision. The attacks aren’t anywhere near Earth. You stay at work.”

“I want to be with you, in case.” In case of what, he didn’t know. If Earth fell, it would all be over. And not even Paula could get them places on a Dynasty lifeboat.

“Should you travel now?” she asked.

“Of course. If anything gets through that force field it won’t matter where you are. I’ll get a taxi.”

“I don’t want to be trouble.”

“You’re not.”

Hoshe grabbed his coat from the hook on the back of the door. A red priority icon flashed up into his virtual vision; it was Captain Kumancho, who was leading the Senate Security detail following Victor Halgarth. “Damn!” Hoshe touched the icon with his turquoise virtual finger.

“We’ve just arrived on Boongate,” Kumancho said. “Victor went to one of the warehouses out in the station marshaling yard. It belongs to a company called Sunforge, local transport and courier outfit. We’re datamining it now.”

“Okay. Are you emplaced?”

“As best we can. Hoshe, it’s chaos here. There’s half the planet’s population camped outside the station. CST has just closed the wormhole. We must have been on the last train in. My people are worried we won’t be able to get back.”

“Shit. Right, leave it with me. Is the Halgarth team with you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, that’s good. I’ll get in touch with Warren Halgarth; we’ll coordinate our approach and put a process in place to extract you as soon as CST reopens the wormhole. I’ll try and get information on that as well.”

“Thanks, Hoshe.”

“Do you know what’s in the Sunforge warehouse?”

“Not yet. We’re going to start running an infiltration operation once we’re properly established.”

“Do you need help from the locals? I can run the request from this office. It’ll carry more clout.”

“I think we’re on our own, Hoshe. Government here has just about collapsed. CST’s station security teams and the city police force are still hanging together, almost, but they’re not going to be assed about a bunch of spooks asking for cooperation. Don’t worry, we can handle Victor and the warehouse.”

“Okay, keep me updated on an hourly basis. I’ll be in the office.” Hoshe stood perfectly still for a moment as he cursed every god he knew about, then hung his coat back on the hook. His turquoise finger touched Inima’s icon. “Darling, I’m sorry. Something’s come up.”