“I’m not saying we don’t ever tell them,” Morton said. “I just want to know what the implications are before we do.”
“How do you propose finding out, exactly?” Rob asked. There was a dangerous edge to his voice.
“Mellanie arranged for encoded messages to be included in the recordings I send to the Michelangelo show. She’ll be able to tell us if it’s safe.”
“Safe!” Rob grunted. “Man, you are paranoid!”
“Look, one day isn’t going to make any difference,” Morton said reasonably. “We’re perfectly safe here. We have to wait until the Randtown force field is expanded anyway. So just humor me.”
“Shit!” Rob gave the Cat an angry stare. “What do you say?”
“Me? I think it’s hilarious, darling. Do it, Morty, screw the navy over. Gets my vote.”
“For what it’s worth,” Simon said, “I trust Mellanie.”
“How can you?”” Mandy demanded. “The little bitch was wrecking our town and everything we stood for, your ideals. The whole Commonwealth hated us because of her.”
“She saved us, though, didn’t she?” Simon said gently. “Surely that is penance enough?”
“Something happened here,” the Bose motile said. Everybody turned to look at it. “This is where MorningLightMountain came up against the SI, the only time they clashed during the whole invasion. That is why I chose Randtown as my return point to the Commonwealth; the SI has some kind of presence here.”
“Had,” Morton said. “It had a presence here. Mellanie works for the SI.”
“Ah,” Simon said. For the first time in weeks, he actually smiled. “I always wondered how she achieved all she did.”
“Your girlfriend is some kind of agent for the SI?” an incredulous Rob asked. “That … that … bimbo?”
“Hey,” Morton growled.
The Cat was laughing again. “Oh, this is fabulous. Thank you so much, Morty.”
Morton gave Rob a level gaze. “So do I tell the navy or not?”
Rob glanced around at everyone, then gave the stationary motile a long stare. “What the fuck. Do what you like for now, Morton. But after we set off the nuke your girl had better provide one hell of a reason not to tell the navy what we’ve got. That’s how long she’s got.”
Mark and Liz spent the evening in their living room, sharing a bottle of wine and accessing the final moments of Randtown. It was Ulon Valley wine. His e-butler’s search program had found a supplier on Lyonna who had a few bottles left; it was an extortionate price, and then there was the premium same-day shipping charge to MoZ Express couriers on top of that. But what else could you drink while you watched a nuclear explosion obliterate your old hometown?
Mellanie had joined Michelangelo in his studio for the report. She marked the sobriety of the occasion by wearing a long black dress with a panel skirt that fell open to show off her beautiful legs. Her hair had been pulled back from her forehead into a thick, wavy tail. Michelangelo sat behind his desk like a minor Greek god in a sharp blue suit. The sexual tension between them was so strong that anyone using full-band TSI to access the show could almost smell the pheromones they were both pumping out into the studio air.
It certainly gave Mark some uncomfortable reminders of that day he’d encountered her up at the blockade in the Dau’sing Mountains.
“You were there during the evacuation,” Michelangelo was saying.
“What’s your response to this?”
“It was inevitable. I really enjoyed my time in Randtown. The people were a bit quirky, we all know that, but seeing the images of what the Primes had done to the town and the Trine’ba was just devastating to me. They got what they deserved. I only hope the other navy squads are equally effective.”
“You say effective, but they lost two of their members on their first deployment. This remarkable recording, exclusive to our show, reveals the desperate odds our navy troops on the ground are facing.”
The picture changed from the studio to a grainy image of a mountainside in the middle of the night, a composite of various sensor feeds, producing a monochrome image. It was centered on Randtown, with the force field shining like a phosphorescent pearl above the familiar shoreline. The tactical nuclear bomb went off, flooding the interior with light. For a brief second the force field held, containing the explosion. Then it failed, and the mushroom cloud climbed up out of a seething pool of darkness.
“There really is no going back now,” Mark said solemnly.
Liz raised her glass. “To not looking back.”
“Amen.”
They stayed accessed for a while longer, while Mellanie eulogized about the squads that the navy had sent out. There were other recordings that Morton had made. Reconnoiter of Randtown and the aliens. The heroic last stand Doc Roberts and Parker made against the flyers. Simon Rand and the other refugees. She and Michelangelo discussed the navy strategy.
Mark’s e-butler told him someone was approaching the front door.
“At this hour?” Liz asked.
The house array showed them an image of Giselle Swinsol standing outside.
“Oh, Jesus,” Mark complained. “Now what?” He kept having guilty thoughts about all those insistent questions he’d been asking at work.
Giselle came straight into the living room, and refused the offer of a drink. She didn’t sit, either. “You’ve been asking a lot of questions, Mark,” she said. It was an accusation.
Mark was determined not to be intimidated by her tough-bitch personality. “I’m working on a fascinating project; obviously I’m curious. But I can appreciate that Nigel Sheldon doesn’t want the Commonwealth to know about it. You can rely on me.”
“Very good, Mark. The answer to your dreadfully unsubtle question is: yes, you and your family are entitled to a berth on the lifeboats should we face annihilation here.”
“Thank you.” It came out with such a heartfelt sigh he immediately felt ashamed. Once again she’d proved the strongest.
Her glossed lips curved up slightly, acknowledging her position. “So, you now advance to level two.”
“What does that mean?” Liz asked suspiciously.
“It means that Mark has done such a good job here that we feel his kind of expertise is better suited to other, more critical sections of the project.”
“What sections?” he blurted.
“Starship assembly. Pack your bags. The bus will pick you up tomorrow at eight o’clock.”
“We’re moving?” Liz said in alarm. “But the children have only just settled in school.”
“Their next school is just as good.”
“Where is it?” Mark asked. “Where are the evacuation starships being built?”
“Classified.” Giselle gave Liz a small smirk. “You’ll enjoy this next part. It’s right up your street.”
“Cow,” Liz hissed when she’d left.
Mark looked around the living room, the nearly empty bottle, the one big indentation on the couch where they’d snuggled up together. He had felt really comfortable in this house. “I don’t suppose they’ll move us again after this.”
“Only to the other side of the galaxy, baby.”
MORTY, DO NOT INFORM THE NAVY YOU HAVE THE MOTILE CONTAINING BOSE’S MEMORIES. ANY INFORMATION ON MORNINGLIGHTMOUNTAIN IS TOO IMPORTANT TO RISK TO POSSIBLE CORRUPTION.
I HAVE THE RE-LIFED BOSE WITH ME. HE SHOULD RECEIVE THE MEMORIES. THAT WAY HE WILL BE ABLE TO INTERPRET THEM IN THEIR CORRECT SEQUENCE. AFTER THAT WE CAN DECIDE HOW TO PROCEED.
I WILL MAKE ARRANGEMENTS TO EXTRACT YOU FROM ELAN. UNTIL THEN, KEEP THE BOSE MOTILE AND THE REFUGEES SAFE.
MELLANIE.
“I have been re-lifed?” the Bose motile asked.
“She will make arrangements to extract us?” Rob said disbelievingly.
“Mellanie had a wormhole opened to us once before,” Simon said. “She can probably do it again.”
“Probably ain’t good enough, friend.” Rob pointed at the Bose motile.
�
��This is our ticket out of here.”
“To what?” Morton asked. “If she’s right about the navy, we’re not going to help the Commonwealth by giving them this information.”
“Oh, listen to yourself. The Commonwealth navy is the Bad Guy? Get real. They’re the only hope we’ve got. Your girl is trying to build her career by chasing phantoms. She’s a goddamn reporter, one of the biggest turds in the galaxy. Tell the navy we’ve got Bose at the next wormhole opening. Get us out of here.”
“She works for the SI. She can do this. Trust her.”
“Bullshit.”
“Question,” the Cat said. She was sitting in Full Diamond position on the floor of the fissure, clad in a simple leotard, seemingly immune to the cold.
“Morton, when you sent your encrypted message, did you mention Morning-LightMountain by name?”
“No.”
The Cat changed to King Cobra position with simple lithe movements. As she did she gave Rob a sly smile. “How did a conspiracy theorist nut find out its name all by herself?”
Rob’s defiant expression crumpled. “Oh, Jesus H. Christ; fuck-it-up Rob strikes again. I always get the shit assignments. Always. We’re really going to do this, aren’t we?”
“Yep.”
“I have been re-lifed?” the Bose motile repeated.
“Yes,” Morton said.
“And I am dating a beautiful young media reporter?”
“Apparently so, yes.”
“Tell him the rest of it, Morty, my dear,” the Cat said with a smirk. “Mellanie is a complete sex maniac.”
“I would very much like to meet me.”
The star system was on the border between phase one and two space, eight light-years from the Big15 world of Granada. CST had examined it once, and immediately moved on. The M-class star presided over a meager realm of two planets: one small solid world no larger than Earth’s moon, and a Saturn-size gas giant orbited by a dozen moons. As far as habitability was concerned it rated an easy zero. Nobody had ever returned.
The starship Moscow slipped out of hyperspace four hundred thousand kilometers above the gas giant. Its wormhole closed behind it with a short-lived glow of indigo radiance.
Strapped into his couch in the cabin’s cramped operations segment, Captain McClain Gilbert reviewed the data that the starship’s sensors were picking up. The gas giant’s third moon was twenty thousand kilometers away, a heavily cratered ball of rock, three thousand kilometers in diameter. There was no atmosphere. As the visual sensors scanned it, a profile of its surface built up. A recognizable topography of mare plains and hills was revealed, dating back to the moon’s origin. Lusterless peat-brown regolith was scattered thinly over rock strata of dark gray and black. Thousands of craters had mangled the smooth hills, ripping out vast slabs of jagged rock to form vertical cliff ramparts.
There had been no change in the two hundred years since CST’s exploratory division had performed its quick scan.
“Our survey records check out, such as they are,” Mac said; he turned to look at Natasha Kersley in the couch next to him. “There’s nothing alive around here. Is that what you wanted, Doc?”
“Looks good,” she said.
“Can I begin the satellite launch?”
“Yes, please.”
Mac sent a flurry of commands into the ship’s RI. Modified missile launch tubes in the Moscow’s forward section opened and spat out eighteen sensor satellites. Their ion rockets pushed them into a bracelet formation orbiting the nameless moon, allowing them to cover the entire surface simultaneously. Once their coverage was established they’d be able to determine the exact power of the quantumbuster they were here to test.
“So far so good,” he muttered.
“Absolutely. Here’s hoping we don’t have a Fermi moment.”
“A what?” Mac really didn’t like the uncertainty in her voice.
“During the Trinity test of the very first atom bomb, Fermi wondered if the detonation would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. They just didn’t know, you see. We think the quantum disruption won’t propagate. If it does, then the whole universe gets converted into energy.”
“Oh, great, thanks for sharing.” He gave the doomed moon a deeply troubled glance.
“It’s really not very likely,” Natasha said.
It took two hours until Mac was satisfied the satellites were correctly placed, and their communications relay systems were locked together. “Okay, Doc, you’re on.”
Natasha drew a quick breath, and fed her launch code into the prototype quantumbuster warhead. The missile was hurled out of its launch tube by a powerful magnetic pulse. When it was ten kilometers from the starship, its fusion drive ignited, accelerating it hard toward the moon.
“All systems functional,” Natasha reported. “Target acquired. I’m authorizing activation.” She sent another code to the weapon, and received confirmation. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Amen to that,” Mac muttered.
The Moscow opened a wormhole and quickly slipped inside. Five seconds later, and two million kilometers out from the moon, the starship slid back out into real space.
“Receiving satellite data,” Mac said as the communications dish picked up the signal. “Switching to high capacity recording.”
“Two minutes to impact,” Natasha said. “All systems operational.”
“We’re going to see it from here, right?” He was aligning the starship’s sensors back on the moon.
“Oh, heavens, yes. The quantumbuster field will initialize just before the missile hits the surface. That should give us an intersection over several hundred meters of the moon’s mass. It works out to quite a substantial volume.”
“And the whole thing just turns to energy?”
“Any piece of matter inside the field, yes. That’s the theory: the effect completely breaks down quantum-level cohesion. The discharge radiance will be on a scale we’ve never seen before.”
“Discharge radiance,” Mac said with a smile. “You mean explosion.”
She gave him a nervous grin. “Yeah.”
Mac turned his whole attention to the visual spectrum image that was being projected in front of his face. The moon was a simple dark circle framed by stars. All the sensor satellites were watching eagerly. They showed a tiny purple-white spark sinking toward the surface.
Mac had brought the Moscow out of hyperspace on the other side of the moon from the target zone. If the Seattle Project weapon worked as advertised, the radiation blast would be lethal even at two million kilometers. The Commonwealth would have a decisive weapon to use against the Primes.
“Do you think they’ll negotiate?” he asked.
“If they see this in action, they’d be truly crazy not to,” Natasha said. “I don’t care how bizarre their motives are, they face extinction if we use this against them. They’ll talk.”
Mac desperately wanted her to be right. The way he’d worked his way to the navy’s vanguard, he was pretty sure he’d wind up with the mission to take a quantumbuster to Dyson Alpha.
He checked the moon again, worrying about the whole Fermi moment idea. The missile was seconds away from its brown and black mottled surface. I should have positioned the Moscow on the other side of the gas giant.
The quantumbuster activated its effect field. Light flared around the moon, creating a perfect white halo. It was as if the ancient sphere of rock was eclipsing a white dwarf star. The edges began to dissolve as the glare poured across the cratered surface like an advancing tsunami. Dazzling cracks appeared, opening deep into the moon’s interior. Low rolling hills heaved, transforming into volcanoes that jetted debris hundreds of kilometers out into space. Dusty plains crumbled as they separated ponderously from the highlands surrounding them.
Slowly and inexorably, the moon disintegrated inside its cocoon of lurid stellar light.
“Jesus, Doc,” Mac barked. “You were just supposed to blow the bloody thing out of orbit.”
Gis
elle Swinsol herself was sitting at the front of the bus when it arrived to collect them. It was a fifty-seater Ford Landhound, with luxury seats and a small canteen in front of the washroom cubicles. Two other families were sitting in it, looking lost and vaguely apprehensive. Mark recognized the expression. He’d seen it in the bathroom mirror that morning.
Giselle waited until the porterbots had loaded all the Vernons’ bags and boxes into the luggage compartment at the back. “Don’t look so worried; this isn’t a long trip.”
Mark and Liz swapped a glance, then tried to settle the excited kids.
The bus drove back down the highway toward Illanum. It joined a convoy of vehicles, slotting in behind a forty-wheel transporter carrying one of the completed starship compartments, and in front of three standard container trucks, empty after dropping their loads at a factory. Once they had passed the back of Rainbow Wood the compartment transporter turned off along a long curving slip road; the bus followed it. The slip road fed onto another three-lane highway wide enough to handle the transporters. After another eight kilometers, another slip road joined it, bringing more of the giant transporters.
“I didn’t know there were any other towns on Cressat,” Mark said.
“There are five assembly centers here,” Giselle said. “Biewn and two others are responsible for life support and cargo; one is fabricating the hyperdrives; and the last provides general systems, the starship’s spine if you like.”
Mark began to reevaluate the project yet again. The scale was larger than he’d imagined. So was the timescale; this had to have been going on for a long time prior to the Prime invasion. As for the cost …
The highway was heading directly for the base of a low hill where a circle of warm pink light was shining at them. Mark felt the slight tingle of a pressure membrane as the bus passed through. Then he, Liz, and the kids were pressed against the window, anxious to see the new world.
They’d emerged high up in some mountains, giving them a view out over a flat plain that must have been hundreds of kilometers wide. It had strange yellow rock outcrops, and a jagged volcanic canyon running away diagonally from the mountains. The ground was completely bare, with a thin covering of gray-brown sand scattered over dark rock. Right away on the far horizon were some rumpled dark specks that might have been more mountains; the planet’s lavender-shaded sky made it difficult to tell.
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 154