Pandora's Star

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Three floors of windows in one of the towers erupted, a million spinning splinters of glass surfing out on huge gouts of flame.

  ‘Security command centre not responding,’ the gatehouse array reported. ‘You now have autonomous control of perimeter security.’

  ‘Seal it!’ the senior guard shouted. He loaded his pattern code into the gatehouse array, watching the protective systems come to life. The guardbots halted where they were; hatches opened down the sides of their bodywork, and weapons deployed, locking into ready positions. More reassuringly, the force field generators came on; triplicated and self-powered, they erected a huge dome-shape shield over the entire complex. Air molecules trapped inside the bonding effect sparkled as they absorbed the energy input, aligning themselves into a rigid lattice.

  A further two explosions went off inside the complex. The senior guard tried to work out what was being destroyed, but his status display was almost devoid of information.

  ‘What do we do?’ his partner demanded.

  ‘Just sit tight. We can’t turn off the force field, we don’t have that authority. We’re safe in here.’

  ‘No, we’re bloody not,’ the guard pointed frantically at the huge flames and black smoke rising over the complex buildings. ‘We’re locked in with a bunch of goddamn terrorists.’

  ‘Don’t panic. They just caught us by surprise. The whole place is going to seal up tighter than a lagoon onna’s arse now. Look.’ He pointed at one of the towers. Its outer surface was cloaked in the tell-tale sparkle of a force field. ‘Isolate them and bring in the big guns to mop them up: standard pro-cedure.’ He turned around to see his partner was completely ignoring the complex, instead he was squinting out across the barren expanse of the station yard.

  ‘What the hell are those?’

  *

  It had gone down right to the wire, but the maintenance tech had interfaced all his arrays into the gateway control room network. The RI had been locked out.

  ‘They can’t alter the gateway coordinate,’ he said triumphantly. ‘I’ve isolated the command network, so the system’s fallen back on its internal arrays, everything will just keep ticking over nicely.’

  ‘Great,’ Rob sneered. ‘What about when they cut the power?’ He’d already felt the floor tremble slightly. There’d definitely been an explosion nearby. Some other part of the operation was moving forward. He wished it wasn’t so compartmentalized, it was hard not knowing what was happening.

  The tech gave him a contemptuous look. He sat down behind the console he’d mutilated, and called up new schematics on the large wall-mounted portals. ‘They already have, look. The grid supply is just about zero. We’re already running off the niling d-sink. Everything’s okay. We just have to hold out for another thirty minutes.’

  Rob’s e-butler suddenly reported it could connect to the room’s cybersphere nodes. Half a dozen calls were incoming, demanding his identity. ‘Tell them to fuck off,’ he ordered the e-butler.

  ‘That’s funny,’ the tech said. His eyes were unfocused as he studied the data within his virtual vision. ‘The cybersphere is clear, someone countered the kaos software, it got flushed out.’

  ‘Is that good or bad?’ Rob asked.

  ‘It’s strange. I’d never guessed Anshun’s cybersphere RI was powerful enough to extinguish that level of kaos so quickly.’

  ‘How does it affect us?’ Rob demanded. He always hated working with these specialist nerds, they never appreciated the physical side of any mission.

  ‘It doesn’t, really. I mean, CST security can’t physically get in here, or the chamber with the gateway machinery – we control that force field as well.’ He scratched at the side of his face. ‘It might make it a little tougher for us to exit at the end if all their sensors are back on line. Let me think about that.’

  Rob glanced at the other guard, who simply shrugged.

  ‘Oh wait,’ the tech said. He leant forward as one of the portals switched to a grainy image from a sensor covering the corridor directly outside the control room. ‘Here we go, they got the lift circuit back.’ The sensor showed the lift door closing. Ten seconds later, the remote charge detonated. All Rob saw on the portal image was the lift doors quaking, the central join split apart as the metal buckled. A dense cloud gushed out into the corridor. It was dust not smoke, Rob realized.

  The other guard chuckled. ‘They’ll never get down that way now, the whole shaft must have collapsed.’

  Rob glanced at the metal slab covering the fire door. Security would be down the stairwell which connected to it soon enough. According to the instructions he decrypted that morning, once the lift shaft was out of action they’d be able to leave the control room by the main door. One of the offices off the corridor outside had a utility passage which would take them to the chamber containing the gateway machinery. After that, they had a choice of three exit routes once the force field was switched off. Of course, that had all rather depended on the cybersphere and security sensors being knocked out by kaos.

  ‘Can anyone see in here right now?’ Rob asked. He searched round the ceiling for sensors and cameras. There were at least three covering the room.

  ‘Let me review the local network,’ the tech said. He suddenly froze, and gaped at the portal displaying the gateway command network. One section was flashing red. ‘No way,’ he whispered.

  ‘What?’ Rob demanded.

  ‘The first routing lockout fireshield. It’s down.’

  ‘Once more, in English!’

  ‘Look, the actual fibre optic cables which carry the network, they’re still intact, still integrated with the local datanet, which in turn is connected to the cybersphere. But the nodes, where the routing is controlled, that’s where I loaded my software in to block contact. In electronic terms, there’s no physical barrier between us and the outside, only the fireshields. I erected five, in sequence, at each node, blocking every channel in, and something just got through the outer one.’

  ‘You told us the Anshun RI cleaned out the kaos,’ the other guard said.

  ‘No, I said I didn’t think it could, not that quickly. Jesus!’ Another section of the gateway command network was flashing amber. ‘This isn’t possible, I swear: not possible.’

  ‘Another fireshield?’ Rob guessed.

  ‘It’s going to fall, oh man, half the format codes have been cracked already. No way. I mean no fucking way! Do you know what kind of encryption I used for that thing? Eighty-dimensional geometry. Eighty! That should take like a century to break, if you’re lucky.’ He seemed more angry than worried by the event.

  Rob was starting to get a real bad feeling about the mission. ‘So what can crack that kind of encryption?’

  The tech became very still. ‘The SI.’ His gaze found a ceiling camera which was lined up on his console, and he looked straight into the tiny lens. ‘Oh shit.’

  The other guard brought up his ion pistol, and started shooting the cameras. ‘Find out how many sensors there are in here. Now!’

  Rob took a shot at a sensor above the main door. He risked a quick look at the portal display as he hunted round for more. The amber warning over the second fireshield was shading into a more ominous red.

  *

  The senior gatehouse guard stared out through the window, his lower jaw sagging open as the true nature of the flying objects became apparent. ‘I’ve seen those things before,’ he croaked. ‘I know what they are. They were on an action drama I accessed years ago. Alamo Avengers. But they’re ancient history.’

  ‘Not any more,’ his partner said. ‘What do we do?’

  ‘Pray.’

  All along the highway to the Starship complex, vehicles had halted automatically as the kaos software corrupted their drive arrays. Then when the explosions began and the force field dome came on, people got out to stand on the hot tarmac to watch the spectacle. Several turned as the new sound rumbled up behind them, only to fling themselves down, screaming a warning.

  Th
e Alamo Avengers stormed over the highway at barely a hundred metres altitude. When they were a kilometre from the force field, they opened fire with their particle lances. It was as if sheet lightning was bridging the gap between them and the dome. The entire sky transformed into a blinding white maelstrom as the air disintegrated from the tremendous energy discharge. The soundblast alone shattered every window on the cars and vans and buses below, people were hurled about by the sonic wavefront. Ears and eyes ruptured, capillaries tore apart; blood started to foam out of their mouths and noses and ears, unprotected skin liquefied.

  The force field dome maintained its integrity under the strike. Right across its surface, air molecules collapsed and punched upward in a seething coronal cloud. From above, it looked as though a small red dwarf sun had become buried in the ground. Huge lightning bolts spun outward from the seething ion cloak, lashing against the surrounding earth. Guardbots, waiting alertly along the base of the force field, their lasers and magnetic rifles tracking the incoming enemy, simply detonated into fragment swarms that vaporized in microseconds as the energy cascade engulfed them. Every scrap of vegetation within four hundred metres of the perimeter burst into flame.

  All three Alamo Avengers fired again, concentrating their lances on a single point. Again, the force field resisted, deflecting the terrible energy deluge back out into the tortured coruscating air. Thick cataracts of lightning ripped out, pummelling the ground.

  Inside the gatehouse, both guards had dived to the floor at the first barrage. Their entire world vanished in a violent whiteout. Even inside the force field, the noise was tremendous, translating into direct physical pain stabbing in through their eardrums. When the light died down, they risked looking up. Five hundred metres away, where the lances had been targeted, a huge patch of the force field was still ablaze with radiant violet streamers as residual energy swirls grounded out.

  ‘It held,’ the senior guard grunted in disbelief. He couldn’t hear what he’d just said. When he put his hand up to his ear, his fingers came away sticky with blood. He didn’t care. ‘I’m alive.’ The back of his knuckles smeared tears across his cheeks. ‘Oh sweet Jesus, I’m alive.’

  When he raised his head above the desktop he could see the Alamo Avengers approaching the force field dome. Pitiful fires sputtered below them as the last of the weeds and grass were consumed. They didn’t so much land, as fall out of the air. Their rockets cut off while they were still twenty metres up. Legs stretched out and absorbed the impact, leaving them in a crouching position on the blackened smouldering earth. The head on the nearest one swung slowly from side to side in mockery of a living creature, scanning its sensors back and forth. Their arrays were loaded with animal-sentient smartware, giving them an independence fuelled only by aggression; once their target was loaded in, they wouldn’t stop until it had been reached.

  The lead Alamo Avenger lurched forward, legs thudding heavily as they moved with a speed unnerving for something so massive. Plumes of soot and dirt shot up from each impact, flowing in strange swirls around its own force field. Small sections of armour along the front edge of its head flipped up, allowing long black prongs to slide out. The medium calibre weapon barrels retracted back into their bays. At thirty metres from the base of the dome, it stopped and lowered its thick wedge head. The prongs flared with a cobalt nimbus that spun and flickered. It thrust them down into the ground. Huge geysers of soil were flung up into the air. The Alamo Avenger braced its legs, shoving its head deeper into the hole which the prongs were gouging out. Sand and shards of fractured rock were shooting twenty metres into the air above it. Slowly, it began to ease its huge armoured body down into the excavation.

  *

  Every building on Leithpool’s Castle Mount was illuminated by bright beams of light, their colour gracefully morphing through the spectrum; while above them all, the bold fairy tale castle itself was drenched in the brilliance of thirty solar-bright searchlights. From his position in the curving window of the Prince’s Circle café, Adam had a superb view of the resplendent rock against the backdrop of a serenely clear night. Its reflection shivered across the cold black waters of Leithpool’s circular lake in a near-perfect mirror image. Like all the other late-evening denizens of the café, he’d stopped looking at the view several minutes ago. Unisphere news shows were all featuring the events on Anshun, as were thousands of media companies stretched across the Commonwealth. The café had switched to Alessandra Baron, although even the images she had access to lacked professionalism. They came from the survivors of broken or abandoned vehicles on the highway to the starship complex. Retinal inserts were relaying the sight; the pictures blurry from tears, wobbling as the senders shook from fear or relief.

  They showed the Alamo Avengers digging their way underneath the force field dome. There was actually little now to see of the ancient war machines themselves, the holes which they had dug were deep enough to contain the main bulk of their bodies. Huge sprays of earth were still fountaining up into the sky, to fall as a concealing cloud of dust and fractured stone granules dryer than any desert sand. The volume of dirt they vomited out behind them never slackened. At the speed they were going it could only be a matter of minutes before they were underneath the complex itself. A fact which Alessandra Baron, safe in her studio on Augusta, was keen to point out. She did confess that she knew nothing of the defence capabilities which CST might or might not have built into the complex, although the standard ones didn’t seem to have held out very well so far. Also chosen for emphasis was the legend of just how destructive the Alamo Avengers were.

  ‘Nothing and nobody,’ she said, ‘would survive inside the beleaguered complex if just one got in. We can only pray for the people trapped in there.’ Even her beautiful face with its mane of elegant dark-blond hair seemed troubled.

  Adam was also uncertain if CST had any surprises waiting ahead for the Alamo Avengers. Of necessity, this mission had been put together hurriedly, the time for research was short. He couldn’t be certain of anything, though he strongly suspected there were no serious heavy calibre weapons in the complex.

  Along with all the other transfixed watchers in the café he drew breaths of awe and fright as flashes and rumbles emerged from the gaping tunnel mouths. It wasn’t entirely an act. He’d watched the giant machines being refurbished over the last few months, yet even so he’d been as overwhelmed as everyone else by the sheer brute power they wielded as they launched themselves into battle for what was bound to be the very last time.

  A timer in his virtual vision counted off the mission event sequence. So far they were doing remarkably well in keeping to schedule. Which meant that stage two was about to come on line. As a veteran of many campaigns large and small, Adam knew there was nothing truer than the old military adage: no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. And when that enemy was as powerful and resourceful as CST, he wasn’t about to leave anything to chance.

  *

  Wilson heard the last emergency airlock clang loudly, the noise reverberating along the whole deck which they’d commandeered. None of the primary malmetal airlocks were working, they were all contracted into thick rings around the edge of their rim. But the emergency airlocks offered a reasonable degree of security. He began his deep breathing regimen, calming his racing heart.

  ‘We’re sealed,’ Anna announced. There was a high degree of satisfaction in her voice. Her round face smiled brightly, despite the situation down on the ground. Her eyes and mouth were heavily OCtattooed, producing a filigree of slender gold and platinum lines that flickered in and out of existence on her skin. Hands and forearms were also covered in the same lines, which crawled around her fingers and wrists as she pressed her hands against a console i-spot.

  ‘Good job,’ Wilson told her. He didn’t strictly approve of such flamboyance – that old straight arrow heritage again – his own OCtattoos were completely non-visual. But he had to admit, her performance so far was exemplary. It was Anna who had organized wo
rking parties from the surprised and nervous technicians to go through the life-support section, and physically close the big solid emergency locks with power tools and their own muscle. One of a dozen jobs he’d given her which she’d conducted flawlessly. The air conditioners were up and running, fans stirring the heavy atmosphere, back-up lighting rigged to portable power cells. Now she was organizing personnel into damage crews, ready for anything.

  While she’d been accomplishing that, he had spent the time frantically reviewing what systems the starship had in anything approaching operational status. It hadn’t taken him long. Given the vast quantity of equipment which had been installed so far, only an alarmingly small percentage of it was available to him. And almost none of that was of any practical use to their current situation. Their one major success was using the assembly platform’s emergency communication system to re-establish a link to the planetary cybersphere. Through that, Wilson had been in touch with the SI continually since he reached the starship. He was gratified that the SI was taking a much greater than usual interest in the attack.

  ‘The Anshun special forces squadron will be able to deploy around the complex perimeter in another seven minutes,’ the SI told them. ‘First echelon security reinforcements from CST will arrive at the station four minutes after that; their deployment should be faster than the local forces. Commonwealth Security Directorate forces are also being mobilized.’

  ‘And even if they can get inside the perimeter force field, do any of them have anything which will kill those goddamn Alamo Avengers?’ Wilson asked. He was aware of Anna giving him an anxious glance. Tiny slivers of gold rippled out from her eyes, as she realigned her virtual visual display to access the security data directly.

  ‘I do not believe so,’ the SI said. ‘One of the causes of the Alamo Avenger’s enduring reputation is the sheer power contained within it. They were hugely cost-ineffective to build, had a poor range, and limited tactical ability. Yet their effectiveness against United Federal emplacements was almost one hundred per cent. The Single Star Republic came very close to their goal of turning Austin into an Isolated.’