The Killing of Worlds (17 page)

Or so Alexander’s models predicted.

She rolled into a ball, protecting the positioning device and watching its numbers move. The altimeter showed her to be still accelerating. Terminal velocity for a human was about sixty meters per second on Legis. As close as h_rd could estimate by the rolling altimeter, her speed had passed that. Probably the air up here was thin enough that terminal velocity was noticeably higher, and she would actually be braking as she descended into higher pressures.

After five minutes of falling, warmth began to bloom in the suit. It grimly crossed her mind that she was heating up from reentry friction. But h_rd dismissed the thought; she couldn’t be going that fast. The temperature increase was just the heat trap of the stratopause. After ten minutes total of falling, the air gradually began to grow cold again. She was passing through the stratosphere, approaching the cold air of the tropopause.

Extending her arms slowly, h_rd began to take control of the descent, slowing herself and angling toward the entanglement facility, now as big as a dinner plate below her. She swallowed constantly to keep her ears clear, and watched the numbers on the positioning device roll as she angled her free hand and legs to guide her fall. Her coordinates seemed only incrementally closer to the target. Of course, she was a few minutes from entering the tropospheric wind currents that would push her toward the target snow drift.

h_rd had low-orbit jumped once in training, but that was with a purpose-built Rix suit, parafoil, and artificial-gravity backup. The situation was somewhat different when wearing a retrofitted, improvised Imperial suit and landing in a pile of snow. It wasn’t the equipment that had her nervous, though.

She had faced death at every stage of this mission. It was nothing short of fantastic that she had survived this long. But h_rd had realized during these relatively quiet minutes of freefall that Rana Harter had stolen some of her courage. h_rd found that she wanted to live, a strange desire for a Rix commando.

Perfect, she thought. To encounter fear for the first time while falling—at sixty meters per second and without a parachute—into a heavily guarded enemy facility.

“Love,” h_rd said bitterly. The rampant wind tore the word from her mouth without comment.

After fifteen minutes had elapsed, the longitude and latitude on the positioning device began slowly moving toward the target values; the tropospheric wind was pushing her toward the landing area. And it was getting warmer again, moving toward the merely freezing temperatures of the polar surface.

The entanglement facility was now visibly increasing in size from moment to moment. The sensation of falling became less abstract; h_rd finally saw the ground rushing toward her. She extended hands and feet and angled her body, swooping to bring herself closer to the target area. The positioning device finally beeped; she had matched the snowdrift’s coordinates.

The commando could see it below her now, the winding, snow-filled rift reflecting starlight with pale luminescence. From aerial photographs supplied by Alexander, h_rd had memorized the exact spot she needed to hit. She tucked the positioning device into her pack and began counting down.

The altimeter read 6,000 meters. A hundred seconds to go.

She swallowed fiercely now as air pressure built, cupping her hands to guide herself gently to the target over these last few moments. Invoked by a mental command, her body went through an impact preparation sequence. She expelled the air from her lungs completely, let her muscles relax, rebalanced the ratio of strength and flexibility in her plastic ligaments to favor the latter.

By the time her internal count had reached eight seconds, h_rd was physiologically ready for impact. The deepest part of the trench lay directly below her, no farther than looking down from the top of a medium-sized building. At half a kilometer and falling, details on the ground gained focus rapidly. Rocks and a few scrub bushes became visible, and the moire weave of a retransmitter dish’s arc scintillated in one corner of her vision.

After twenty minutes of falling, it was odd how quickly the snowbound earth was rushing up at her.

Five, four, three …

The surface of the altered snow broke with a pop as she crashed through. She later realized that a thin layer of frost had formed over the nano-doped snow. This brittle crust of rime was at most a centimeter thick—and probably couldn’t have supported more than a few grams of weight. But at sixty meters per second it packed a punch. Like the surface of water at high speed, it had for a moment the force of concrete. The impact broke h_rd’s nose and split her lower lip, and opened a bleeding cut over her right eye.

But then she passed into the colloidal pseudo-snow, which caught her in its foamy arms, slowing her descent. The Rixwoman came smoothly to a stop.

She opened her eyes in total darkness, her head ringing from the impact of breaking the crust. Testing each muscle and joint in turn, she found herself to be uninjured except for the insults to her face. She sat up, orienting herself in the darkness of the cold, compressed foam-snow around her, and looked upwards.

The sky was just visible through the twenty-meter-deep hole she had made. Her own outline, almost comically exact, showed for a few moments before the foam-snow began to collapse, covering her. h_rd breathed deeply and fast, storing oxygen before she was enveloped by the foam. She would remain here motionless for thirty minutes or so. The impact shock of her landing would have registered on the facility’s motion sensors, but if she stayed still, the snow-muffled, momentary vibration would read as simply a cleaving of the snowdrift: an event well within the natural stochastic rumblings of the arctic wild.

The darkness covered her. After the rushing air, especially the frigid layer of the tropopause, the foam-snow brought a blanket of warmth. h_rd felt blood dripping into her eye from her cut, and tended to her wounds as she waited. That brittle crust of ice represented a small error in Alexander’s plan, she noted to herself, the sort of hairline mistake that was magnified a thousandfold in a mission of this difficulty.

No system, not even a compound mind, was perfect. A very unRix thought, but true.

After she’d waited the requisite time, the commando began to tunnel out of the drift. She kept an eye on the positioning device, not trusting her own magnetoreceptor direction-finding cells this close to the pole. Her oxygen reserve was limited, and any wrong turn that led her into an unclimbable wall could be deadly. It would be rather banal to drown in this foam after surviving an eighty-kilometer fall.

The nano-doped snow was strange stuff. In the readout light of the positioning device, she could see the tiny bubbles that made it up, composed of water structured by large carbon molecules. The substance seemed dry when touched gently, but under shock it disintegrated into a wet, somewhat slimy substance. In her hand the bubbles broke down quickly into water; even her low body temperature was sufficient to disrupt its stability. When the warm winds of spring came, all evidence of how this trick had been performed would be gone forever.

h_rd reached the edge of the foam, and climbed from the trench into a drift of real snow. She raised a periscope through the crust first, and surveyed the area. There was no sign of an Imperial response to her landing. She pulled herself from the drift and dusted snow and foam from her. The ablative suit had torn on impact, and a few icy trickles of water already numbed her feet.

The Rixwoman crawled away from the landing zone, careful to keep her distance from the area of doped snow. Anyone stepping on that part of the drift would plummet to the bottom of the trench, softly but ignominiously. There were also vibration sensors to be wary of. h_rd moved slowly and haltingly, an uneven motion designed to mimic natural processes.

The commando searched the horizon for the telltale glimmer of microwave arrays. The threads of the off-line repeaters glowed like spiderwebs all around her, the nearest thirty meters away. With her painstakingly slow and interrupted crawl, it took h_rd five minutes to traverse the distance.

The main portion of the device was roughly the size of a fist. From this central mass radiated the microwave receiver array, the slender filaments that gathered the civilian communications of Legis bound for translight transmission. The transmitter stick rose from the center of the fist, a decimeter-high antenna that forwarded the data to the entanglement facility.

The repeater also sported four legs and two manipulator arms. The hordes of them that dotted the tundra functioned as a single entity. They moved slowly, but quickly enough to disperse or gather themselves as their throughput required. The whole system was distributed over thousands of square kilometers, making it difficult to sabotage and impossible to destroy from space without megatons of explosives. These repeaters were a hardy system, a wartime backup to the vulnerable hardlines, meter-wide cables through which the data usually flowed. Once the Imperials had realized that the compound mind had successfully propagated, they had isolated the facility. The repeaters had been taken off-line by hand: hundreds of militia workers moving through the snow on foot and disconnecting the repeaters individually. The facility’s input had been reduced to a single hardline connection, a low-bandwidth coupling that the military tightly controlled. Alexander was cut off.

The Imperials assumed that any measure undertaken by hundreds of humans by hand would be irreversible without similarly crude measures. But Alexander had other ideas.

h_rd looked at the repeater closely. Its power pack seemed out of alignment, tilted to one side at an angle of about fifteen degrees. She refocused her eyes into their microscopic mode, and noted the simple measure the Imperials had taken. The receivers were still working, still sucking up the vast quantity of data that Legis produced, but the repeater was physically disconnected from its power supply. Tilted those few degrees, the pack was disjunct from its contact, thus all off-planet transmissions were halted here, a few kilometers from their goal.

h_rd approved of the awesome simplicity of it. The thing actually functioned like some pre-spaceflight switch. Again, the crudeness of the Imperials impelled a certain grudging respect from the Rixwoman.

With her smallest finger, she clicked the power pack back into the correct position. That was it. The lethal wire and two thousand kilometers of wilderness protected nothing but this simple switch.

Her mission was complete.

She crawled slowly back to the edge of the landing zone and buried herself in a few decimeters of the snow-foam, leaving only a breathing hole. She would wait here for a few more hours before making her rather noisy escape.

Before covering her head, h_rd looked back and saw that the repeater she had fixed was already moving, making its beetlelike way across the snow.

Alexander was inside the wire.

It was good to be back in the halls of the Senate Forum. The air seemed to be cleaner here, the wash of politics more pure.

The Senate was an unruly chamber, of course, more so now that the special war session was in full swing. But the numberless details of the Senate’s agenda balanced each other, blending into a shape as smooth as the rumble of a distant ocean. The noisy debates here were a relief for Nara Oxham after the demands of the War Council, where each crisis came into absolute focus, and lives were in play with every vote.

“You were right, Niles,” she said as they walked together back toward her offices. Oxham had just presented the last few days of the council’s work to the full Senate.

“I knew they’d love you, Senator. Even the lackeys were standing by the end.”

“Not about that, Niles,” she said, waving away his praise. The speech had gone well, though. Captain Laurent Zai had made them all look brilliant. The
Lynx
‘s attack on the Rix battlecruiser had given the Empire its first victory, a gift to the propaganda effort. Counterattacks in an interstellar war could take years to mount, time spans over which even the most resolute society’s morale could falter. But Zai had struck back against the Rix in a matter of days.

“In any case, I have my speechwriters to thank for that.”

Niles began a sputter of protest at this.

“I was referring, in any case,” she interrupted, “to when you cautioned me about losing my way in the council. Forgetting why we came here. You were right to warn me.”

“Senator,” the old man said, “I never thought that was a likelihood. I just had to say something. I get paid to advise you.”

Nara smiled at her counselor’s clumsy modesty. The world seemed bright to her today. She’d played the Senate like some Secularist street gathering back on Vasthold, pulled the bright tracery of their emotions through the courses that Niles’s speech had mapped out for her. The moment in which she’d captured them had come early, the critical juncture when she could feel their agreement with the council’s war plan coalescing, reacting to her words like a flock of birds turning in unison.

The sharp flavor of the captive crowd still lingered in her mind, and Nara savored the way it blended with the sunlight penetrating the high windows along the Forum great hall. But the pleasures of politics were trifles compared to the real source of her joy.

Laurent Zai had survived, escaping death again.

Of course, only a handful knew that his success in battle had saved an entire world. It seemed fantastic now that the War Council had contemplated something so monstrous. She wondered what the two living counselors who had voted for the Emperor’s plan had felt as the hour of genocide had approached.

To Senator Nara Oxham, it seemed that she had emerged from the crisis with far more power on the War Council. She’d been the first to vote against the plan, so her voice was now second only to the Emperor’s. The once unanimous council was beginning to develop fault lines, the living against the dead, Senator Oxham against the sovereign. The Emperor hadn’t lost a vote yet, but Oxham could see him steering away from ideas when she voiced opposition to them, reluctant to force any issue that she might raise a majority against.