The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle (221 page)

“How long will it take to manufacture a hundred and seventy thousand Douvoir missiles?” Toniea Gall asked.

“We could probably get them completed within nine months, providing we authorize a super crash-priority project. I’m not sure we have that kind of time available. If they are still planning on colonizing the New48, they could be in orbit around each of them within a week.”

“You’re talking about evacuation regardless of the Primes,” Justine said.

“Yes. That is our preferred option. Let them all land and take them out with a quantumbuster.”

“We’ve already got a monstrous refugee problem from the Lost23, and most of them were low-population worlds. How many people live on the New48?”

“Not including Wessex,” Nigel said, “about thirty-two billion people.” This time the silence was even more profound.

“It can’t be done,” Hans Brant said. “Can it?”

“Physically removing them through the wormholes is possible,” Nigel said. “However, accommodating a diaspora of such magnitude within the remaining Commonwealth is totally impractical. There is nowhere for that many people to live; feeding them on basic rations alone would virtually bankrupt the rest of us.”

“Then we have to face that prospect,” Justine said. “I for one will not even consider any proposal that includes abandoning these people. Wars inevitably instigate societal change; it looks like this is shaping up to be ours.”

“A noble sentiment, my dear,” Hans Brant said. “But even if the Senate were to assume draconian powers, and force the refugees on the rest of the Commonwealth, some planets would resist.”

“We cannot turn our backs on thirty-two billion lives!” Justine stormed.

“There is an alternative,” Nigel said quietly. “A risky one, of course.” This time he felt almost nothing but contempt at the way everyone turned to him with hope and desperation in their eyes. “We open up forty-seven fresh planets, and simply transfer the populations over directly so they can rebuild their societies.”

“For Christ’s sake, man,” Alan said. “You can’t dump billions of people on undeveloped worlds. They need cities, and infrastructure, government … food!”

“I know,” Nigel said. “That would all have to be prepared beforehand.”

“But … we’ve got less than a week,” Toniea Gall spluttered.

“As Einstein once said, time depends on the relative position of the observer.”

When President Doi officially closed the War Cabinet session, Justine waited in her chair while the other Dynasty leaders went over to Nigel to offer their thanks and congratulations. Even Heather was conciliatory enough to congratulate him. As for Doi, Justine had never seen the President so pathetically happy; she almost ran across the anteroom to tell Patricia Kantil the outcome. Patricia’s face was soon beaming a huge, incredulous smile.

How stupid,
Justine thought. It was as if declaring something were possible had made it happen. And everything they’d agreed in cabinet was dependent on nothing else going wrong.
How’s the Starflyer going to react?

“You wanted to see me, I believe?” Nigel said. He’d come over to stand beside her chair. Justine looked up at him.
And exactly how do I tell if I’m looking at the Starflyer’s number one agent in the Commonwealth?
Her hand went to the slight bump in her belly.
I need to secure a place on one of the lifeboats, just in case.

“I do,” she said.

“Excellent. On one condition.”

“What’s that?” she asked in trepidation.

“You and Investigator Myo bring Mellanie with you.”

Justine’s jaw dropped. “Huh?”

“Mellanie Rescorai. I’ve been wanting to meet her for quite a while now. She’s with the Investigator, isn’t she? They traveled back to Earth together from Illuminatus.”

“Yes,” Justine said, struggling to regain her poise.
How does he know that? More important, why does he know that?

“Excellent. We’ll do it after we’ve all made this stupid public announcement. The CST offices at Newark should give us some privacy.” He smiled. “I’m glad you’re okay after the assassin’s attempt on your life. Tell Gore I’m impressed, as always.”

“I’ll let him know,” Justine promised.

Edmund Li knew he was being stupid staying on. He should have left Boongate weeks ago, when the loose collection of relatives and friends that made up his family all departed on a train to Tanyata. They’d called him every time a connection to the unisphere was available, a schedule that was even worse than the link to Far Away, showing him images of the tent they were living in, scenes from everyday Tanyata life. So he got a good sketch of them and fifty thousand others spread out in a makeshift township not far from the ocean, one of eight such townships centered around the CST station. Everybody was helping to lay down the grid of their new city, building up the infrastructure, doing the work normally left to bots. They all helped out, they all knew their neighbors. There was a pioneer spirit there that human worlds hadn’t possessed since the very first planets were opened up three hundred years ago. Despite the hardship, it looked like a good place to live.

Still, Edmund hadn’t left. The really stupid thing was, technically, he didn’t even have a job anymore. The Far Away freight inspectorate division had nothing left to do. Nobody on Far Away was importing anything. There was nothing for his team to scan and analyze; besides, the others had all left a couple of days after the navy intelligence people had visited; it was just him now. He’d watched all the other offices in the small administration block thin out and dwindle to nothing, which made him the de facto Boongate government official in charge of all travel to Far Away.

At first he kept doing it because of the navy’s Paris office, which had asked him to keep monitoring traffic to and from Far Away. It was important, Renne and Tarlo had said. After a while, he became intrigued by Far Away and what was going on there—that wasn’t a good enough reason to stay, he knew, and yet … The people leaving Far Away were nearly all the same; every Carbon Goose flight was packed full with migrants who’d sold virtually everything they had to buy a ticket. They arrived bowed under the weight of a world with a standard gravity, and burdened further with pitiful expectations of the Commonwealth. Edmund was doing well if he managed to collect all their names before they disappeared into the station terminal where they believed they’d find sanctuary. By talking to them he did manage to gather a picture of the strange turmoil afflicting Far Away, the criminal sabotage, the rise of the Institute in enforcing law and order in Armstrong City.

But it was the people who were still traveling to Far Away who sparked his real interest. Why anyone should choose to go there at this time was incomprehensible. Yet they kept turning up with their return tickets: technical staff for the Institute, security staff for the Institute, managers for the Institute. No Institute staff were on the flights coming back from Far Away; yet they would be the only people left on the planet with return tickets.

In his zeal to understand more of that benighted planet, he ran innumerable searches through the unisphere for information. For the first time ever he began to pay attention to what the Guardians were saying. Yes, they were a bunch of psychopathic terrorists, but put into the context of everything he was witnessing, their claims made unpleasant sense.

Last week even the Carbon Goose flights had stopped as the pilots and crews deserted to head for safer parts of the Commonwealth. Then the CST technical support staff began to slip away from the station. He was mildly surprised that the wormhole to Wessex remained functional, there were so few maintenance personnel left to operate Boongate end. A lot of everyday engineering was being carried out by remote from the Big15 world.

That should have been the right time to leave, Edmund knew. The RI controlling the gateway to Far Away would no doubt shut it down when enough components expired and preset safety limits were reached. It might last a day, or six months; Edmund was hardly an expert. Not that it mattered; without the Carbon Goose crews there was no way to get to Far Away anymore. He felt almost guilty thinking such thoughts; by now he considered himself the only person who cared about the fate of that remote planet, the lone watchman on the border looking out across the void.

Then three days ago something else changed. The communications link between Half Way and Far Away opened at the correct time, but the message traffic flowing into the Commonwealth unisphere wasn’t even one percent of normal, and all of it was encrypted. Any messages or calls going to Far Away were bounced back, including his own official request for information to the Governor’s House. Far Away was now completely isolated.

For three days Edmund Li kept a solitary vigil in his lonely office, waiting to see what was going to happen. Then the Primes attacked.

He followed the invasion through the news shows and official government information feeds. The swarm of ships emerging three AUs out from the star. The flare bomb fired into the star. A secret navy superweapon that was terrifyingly powerful, extinguishing the flare bomb, but with such a high price. Then another flare bomb was fired into Boongate’s star. The navy was forced to blow it up again. Sensors on the satellites orbiting Boongate captured the oceanic waves raging through the star’s corona; they also recorded the sudden and deadly rise in solar radiation playing over the planet.

Without warning or explanation, every Prime wormhole into the Commonwealth shut down. Humans had won—if you discounted the thousands of warships gathering like stormcrows around forty-eight Commonwealth worlds.

It was the weather that probably saved Edmund. He’d spent a couple of hours sitting at his desk accessing reports and firsthand accounts of the invasion, with the occasional foray over to the vending machine for cups of tea. After the wormholes vanished, he started tracking Boongate’s satellite sensor data, seeing the direct impact the radiation gale was having on the planet. Electromagnetic energy was absorbed and weakened to some extent by the atmosphere before it reached the ground. Even so, the dosage was far greater than most animals and plants could comfortably withstand. The first wave of particle radiation arrived not much later, virtually wiping out the ionosphere in the first few minutes. It was much worse than the news studio experts predicted. Power supplies outside the cities and towns protected by force fields became erratic or failed altogether under the surges. All the civil satellites dropped out as they were exposed, leaving sensors on the planetary defense platforms as the only source of information. Borealis storms swept down from the poles, their pale dancing colors bringing a weird beauty to the destruction falling silently across the world.

Edmund went outside to watch the first of the aural lightshows swirl around the city’s force field. The parking lot still had puddles left over from the night’s rainfall before the station and city force fields deflected the clouds. There was only one car standing on the concrete, his own, a fifteen-year-old Honda Trisma. He stood beside it as the mauve and apricot phosphorescence came rippling out of the horizon at supersonic speed. Even the winter clouds had retreated before the elementary tide, producing a clear winter sky. When he squinted up at the sun, he convinced himself he could see small bright spots on the glaring disk.

Sheet lightning flickered over the city. For a moment it outshone both the sun and the borealis lights. Small rivulets of purple ions skated down the curvature of the force field dome. Then the aurora was back in full, reflecting its hot luminescence across the wet concrete.

The unisphere was telling everyone still outside a force field to seek shelter immediately. Lightning flashed again, a longer burst this time. Edmund started counting for the thunder, until he realized how useless that was. There were long sparkles mingling with the borealis streamers now, adding to their intensity, helping to drown out the ordinary sky. Lightning snapped between the varied undulating color bands. It was a strangely beautiful death cloak for a planet to throw around itself, he thought.

His e-butler told him there was an emergency address to the Commonwealth by the War Cabinet. The planet’s cybersphere would carry nothing else. He didn’t even know the managing RI could do that.
About time,
he thought,
we could do with knowing what’s going on, and what happened in the battle.
CST still hadn’t reopened the wormhole to Wessex, though the parallel zero-width wormhole was obviously keeping Boongate connected to the unisphere.

The image that rose up into his virtual vision showed him President Doi sitting at the head of an imposing table, flanked by Nigel Sheldon and Heather Halgarth. Edmund pursed his lips:
Impressive indeed.
Captions labeled the other cabinet members for him; the amount of political power gathered together was an indication that whatever had been decided was definite. He leaned back against his Honda to listen to his fate.

“My fellow citizens,” Doi said, “I will start by telling you that the Prime incursions into Commonwealth space have now ended, at least for the immediate future. A frigate managed to get through to Hell’s Gateway and destroy the wormhole generators there. I cannot give you details about the ship or the weapon used for obvious security reasons, but suffice it to say we now have at our disposal a weapon of truly formidable power. Sadly, as I’m sure you are all aware, this does not eliminate the Prime threat entirely. There are many thousands of Prime warships already in Commonwealth space which will have to be dealt with. In addition, the Primes deployed flare bombs whose effects are still being felt on the Second48 worlds. There is nothing we can do to deflect the radiation saturating those planets. In short, their biospheres will in all probability be rendered uninhabitable. Even if a regeneration program were possible, as it may be on Wessex, all these worlds will see battle again as the navy combats the remaining Prime ships over the coming weeks. It is therefore with huge regret that I have informed the planetary leaders we have no choice but to evacuate their worlds.”