The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “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 meters up. Legs stretched out, and absorbed the impact, leaving them in a crouching position on the blackened smoldering 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 fueled 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 armor along the front edge of its head flipped up, allowing long black prongs to slide out. The medium-caliber weapons barrels retracted back into their bays. At thirty meters 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 that the prongs were gouging out. Sand and shards of fractured rock were shooting twenty meters into the air above it. Slowly, it began to ease its huge armored body down into the excavation.

  Every building on Leithpool’s Castle Mount was illuminated by bright beams of light, their colors 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 that 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. It was a point that Alessandra Baron, safe in her studio on Augusta, was keen to point out. She did confess that she knew nothing of the defense capabilities that CST may or may 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-caliber 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 that they’d commandeered. None of the primary malmetal airlocks on the Second Chance 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 fingers against a console i-spot.

  “Good job,” Wilson told her. He didn’t strictly approve of such flamboyance; his own OCtattoos were completely nonvisual. But he had to admit, her performance so far was exemplary. It was Anna who had organized the surprised and nervous technicians into working parties 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 that she’d conducted flawlessly. The air conditioners were up and running, fans stirring the heavy atmosphere, backup 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 that 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 communications system to reestablish 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 ab
ility. Yet their effectiveness against United Federal emplacements was almost one hundred percent. The Single Star Republic came very close to its goal of turning Austin into an Isolated.”

  “You mean we don’t have guns inside the complex big enough to take them out?”

  “No. But the Security Directorate does have the necessary firepower, especially given the age of the Alamo Avenger force field generator design. However, you will have to wait until they arrive. Their Anshun deployment should start in twenty-five minutes.”

  Wilson took another look at the display screen. He and Anna had set up their command post in a crew office that had several network systems and arrays installed, though precious little else. The walls and flooring were still raw structural panels; ducting ran across the ceiling like a pair of dull-silver serpents twined in a mating position. So far, three console screens were set up to show crude representations of the starship’s internal status, while the remaining two were being fed images from the cameras around the assembly platform. There hadn’t been a repeat of the explosion in the assessment room beyond the gateway, but that wasn’t what he worried about seeing now.

  “Are they under the perimeter yet?” he asked the SI.

  “Most definitely. The volume of earth they are ejecting behind them has not decreased. Our best estimate already puts them one hundred and eighty meters inside the force field. They will probably surface soon.”

  “How long till they reach the gateway?” Anna asked. Her OCtattoos had sunk into quiescence. She was looking directly at the screen that showed the camera image covering the gateway from inside the assembly platform.

  “The shortest time is six minutes,” the SI said. “To derive that, we are assuming they will continue underground until they are underneath the complex’s buildings before surfacing. That tactic means they will not have to expend any energy breaking through the building wall’s force fields.”

  “Okay, let me have it straight: Can the Alamo Avengers break through the gateway force field?”

  “If their original specifications have not been downgraded, our estimate is that it will take at most two shots from a particle lance to break through the gateway force field’s cohesion.”

  “Son of a bitch.” Wilson growled it through clenched teeth. He kept telling himself that it wasn’t even dying in this body that frightened him—there was enough bandwidth in the satellite link to download his memory into a secure store right up until the last instant. No, it was being unable to defend the project from some bunch of half-assed anarchist terrorist freaks. The project didn’t deserve this; they were trying to achieve something noble and right with the starship. No piece-of-shit trendy-cause rebel outside the political process had the right to screw with that. Not to mention the time and money and—goddamn it!—lives which had been poured into its construction.

  “I can probably route some additional power from the ship to the platform’s force field generator,” Anna said. Platinum spirals were rotating slowly around her eyes as she studied a network schematic within her virtual visual. “One of the niling d-sinks is partially charged; that should give us enough power to last for hours. I think I can route it through the superconductor cabling; we just have to reprogram the umbilical junctions to reverse the flow.”

  “Can you help us with that?” Wilson asked the SI.

  “From our analysis of your resources, your power output is actually capable of exceeding the force field generator’s designated input,” the SI said. “However, the generator was never designed to withstand the kind of stress inflicted from a particle lance. One Alamo Avenger could break through relatively quickly. Two in combination will require less than ten seconds.”

  “Fuck it!” Wilson raged. “You have to close the gateway for us. They cannot be allowed to destroy this starship.” He wanted to add: It’s not fair, the Second Chance deserves her shot at history, she shouldn’t die like this, not stillbirthed.

  “The fireshields erected around the gateway network are proving exceptionally resolute,” the SI said. “We have so far broken three. The fourth utilizes one hundred and sixty dimension geometry encryption. It will take us several minutes to crack it.”

  “We don’t have several minutes!”

  “Our calculations are not in error.”

  Wilson twisted his body to look at Anna. She was floating in front of the console, gazing at the screen that displayed the ship schematic. Her hands pressed tight against the console i-spot; gold glyptics chased slow strange patterns across the stretched skin of her forearms.

  “Is there any kind of weapon installed?” he asked desperately.

  Her virtual hands were pulling data out of the array as if by brute physical force. “No, sir. Nothing.”

  “Goddamnit!” He punched at the nearest surface with his free hand, sending his body into a nasty twist, which strained the hand he was holding himself in place with.

  “Any sign of them breaking surface yet?” He was just going to have to leave it all to the SI, and pray it could break the fireshield in time.

  “No,” the SI said.

  “Okay. Will you please set up a store to receive the memories of everyone on board. If you can’t close down the gateway, they’ll have to be transferred to the clinic which performs the re-life procedures.”

  “We will do that, of course. But there is now a new problem.”

  Anna gave Wilson an anguished look. He could see how hard it was for her to keep going, the effort it required to stay resolute. Executive management was hardly training for this kind of situation. He would have to consider that carefully later—once they survived this. In the meantime there wasn’t much he could say to help. “What now?” he asked levelly.

  “Anshun Civil Flight Control is tracking two unauthorized spaceplane launches from an island close to the equator.”

  “What kind of launch?”

  “Unknown. But they appear to be accelerating into a retrograde orbit.”

  It took Wilson a second to work out the implication. “They’re heading for us,” he murmured.

  “It would appear so, yes.”

  “How long?”

  “If their acceleration remains constant, eight minutes.”

  “Have you got any idea of their size?”

  “From their radar return, they appear to be medium-lift spaceplanes. If so, they will mass around two hundred and fifty tons each, unloaded.”

  Wilson didn’t even try to do the math in his head. Two hundred fifty tons impacting at a combined speed of twice orbital velocity … “They don’t even need to carry a warhead,” he said. And it didn’t matter anymore if the gateway was switched off or not. If the Alamo Avengers didn’t get them, then kinetics would.

  Somebody somewhere really hates us, Wilson thought. Why, though? What’s the point, we will get to the Dyson Pair eventually. I’ll re-life, and by Christ I’ll fly this ship yet.

  And with that the muscles in his arms locked in shock. “Anna! We pressure tested the fuel tanks two weeks ago. I remember the schedule.”

  “Yes,” she said cautiously.

  “Is there any fluid left in the tank?”

  The concrete floor in cosmic radiation test laboratory 7D quaked slightly. Equipment juddered along benches and desks. A soft roaring sound was just audible, its volume increasing in tandem with the ferocity of the quakes. Cracks began to appear across the floor, with little splinters of concrete flaking off to jump and spin across the now-unstable surface. Ceiling-mounted cameras scanned back and forth. But the only illumination in the laboratory was a pale amber emergency lighting that had come on after the complex generators had been sabotaged. It provided a poor resolution.

  Seconds later, the floor disintegrated, with vast chunks of concrete whirling upward, their molten edges throwing off glowing droplets. Beneath the torn rift a dazzling jade-white light poured upward to blind the cameras. Small tendrils of energy followed an instant later, scratching and clawing at every neutral surface, vaporizing meta
l and obliterating plastic and glass.

  Then the light went out. An Alamo Avenger heaved itself up and out into the flame-shrouded ruin of the laboratory. Its head swung around to focus on its goal, casually demolishing a wall and several support pillars. Chunks of masonry and the shattered floor of the upstairs laboratory crashed down, only to slither and bounce off the armored monster’s force field. The six legs shifted around, turning the body until it was lined up behind the head, pointing directly toward the gateway. It moved forward, slowly at first, smashing through another internal wall. Gradually it built up speed.

  As it charged through the constructionbot maintenance center, the floor ruptured underneath its feet. Slightly off balance, it lumbered onward for a few meters, then stopped and twisted its head around to see if there was any threat. Impenetrable jets of dust gushed up from the new rip in the ground. Then a second Alamo Avenger pushed and forced its way out of the tunnel. The first waited until it was level, then they began their final charge toward the assessment building and the gateway.

  The café was utterly silent as Alessandra Baron’s overawed voice announced the rise of the spaceplanes. Adam realized he was licking his upper lip in anticipation, and hurriedly stopped. The images shifted from the smoldering land around the complex force field dome to a clean graphic of the assembly platform’s orbit around the planet. In conjunction with Baron’s now-somber voice they illustrated the impending destruction. Figures in the corner of the screen counted down. They almost matched the timer in Adam’s virtual visual.

  Second Chance had at most another four minutes. He took a quick look around the rapt faces of the other customers, seeing horror and fascination in equal amounts. For once he didn’t feel any guilt at what he’d done. There were no innocents in the assembly platform, no children devoid of memorycells. Not this time. This time it would be right.