The particle beams still splashed away from the barrier that protected the planet before the Vereal ships.
In a voice as cold and hard as ice four, Gibreal ordered, “Power shift. All power to de-energizers.”
Unseen beams, represented by green dashes on the visual representational screens, focused on the nexial points of the purple-white bands that shielded Old Earth from the cyb energy weapons.
The shimmering haze that shielded Old Earth shivered, vibrated, but held.
“Almost,” grunted Gibreal. “Almost.”
“Fire remaining busters! Now!”
The ten tach-heads mounted on subtranslation drives flashed toward Old Earth, apparently untouched.
The third wave of scouts passed the Vereal shields—and remained intact.
Then, impossibly, the shimmer-shield of Old Earth flared, flexed, and both scouts and torps were gone.
A second sun followed that flexing, a sunburst so violent that the Vereal shipnets screamed.
As the electroneural screaming dropped, and the screens cleared, Gibreal noted that the Old Earth shield flickered ever so slightly, and one of the asteroid stations had lost its shields.
“Systems, get me more power for the de-energizers. Anywhere.”
“Power output is at ninety percent maximum and degrading.”
“Get me power,” Gibreal grunted.
“Half the crew’s dead,” protested Weapons. “No power, no atmospheric integrity.”
“I ordered power.” As his thoughts iced over the net, Gibreal slammed the overrides and smashed through the weapons officer’s barriers. Weapons slumped in his couch, mind-burned, mind-numb.
All but the priority screens went dead.
“Power at ninety-two percent for three minutes.”
The de-energizers stabbed and worried.
The silver shimmer-shield flickered and wavered, then flexed once more, throwing a lance of purple-white flame that seemed to climb back up the line of de-energizers.
The Gibson shivered once, then began to vibrate. With a shrieking hiss, the net stabbed at the cybs still conscious, and Gibreal cut his connection, his eyes burning, his fingers stabbing at the slow, hard-wired, fibreline-linked controls before him.
As the first flicker of purple stripped the fleet shields, as the first Vereal ship shuddered, shivered, and translated into energy and fist-sized globules of adiamante, a second asteroid system station flared, and a third … and fourth … .
“Depower!” Gibreal’s fingers slashed at the clumsy switchplates and dials, but the lance of white-purple flame continued to climb back toward the twelve adiamante hulls.
Gibreal hit another set of switchplates, and found them powerwelded open. Finally, he cold-slammed the fusactors, and sat in the dim red light of the emergencies, waiting before the blank black screens … waiting, as purple fire inexorably climbed the dead pathway of the de-energizers toward the twelve dead hulls.
“Systems … non-functional … non-functional …” pulsed MYL-ERA, her words electronic mutters on the dying net that had once bound the Gibson and the eleven other ships as tightly as their adiamante hulls.
In the silence of empty space, white-purple energy consumed twelve hulls, then rebounded.
With that last pulse, the impact of the energy recoil, the global energy net shivered and fragmented … . Vanishing as if it had never been … . carrying with it the remaining asteroid stations.
Beneath the spreading cloud of adiamante fragments, and ionized atoms that had been ships’ interiors and crews, a last double-handful of torps dropped toward the planet below, past the vanishing violet energy of the defense system, dropped across oceans, mountains, homing on the strongest energy sources, except for one pretargeted hill in lower Deseret, where the energy radiations were almost nil.
XXXV
Finally, I managed to click out of step-up, but all I could do was stare at the representational screen of the control center.
No cyb ships—and not a single asteroid station.
My eyes and mind kept burning—burning for Crucelle, Elanstan, and Rhetoral and all those on the ell stations—and for poor unbending Arielle, who would try for the rest of her life to find rational explanations for the irrational behavior of the cybs, and for the need to apply the Power Paradigm.
“Forty-three torps under the beams … .” said someone.
I turned and looked at Wiane, her eyes wide with horror.
Beyond her sat the darkangel, blackness around her like a shroud, immobile.
Above us all loomed the wide representational screen, showing the approaching trails of the more than forty killer torps—the legacy of the cybs, and The Flight.
With a struggle, I accessed the locators.
“First impact at Chitta—seven standard minutes.”
“Interrogative impact at Parwon.”
“Nine standard minutes.”
After a time, I slowly turned in the swivel. Arielle remained frozen, sitting on the eternal tile beside Crucelle’s body, not touching him, just there. Kemra still sat in the straight-backed chair, eyes wide, glued on the representational screen, as though she still could not believe that the fleet of the Vereal Union—twelve impregnable adiamante hulls—had ceased to exist. Except that they hadn’t just ceased to exist—across Old Earth, more than a half million demis had given their minds and lives to stop that fleet.
I looked down. My eyes burned too much to weep, but I felt that way—and insane widower that I was, I was angry.
First I pulled myself out of the swivel and eased over to Arielle. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, touching her shoulder. Crucelle had wanted me to be Coordinator, and I knew why. So did she, but it didn’t make it any easier.
“You did what had to be done. He wanted that. And you tried everything to make it fall on you.” She shook her head. “I’ll be fine. I always am.”
I didn’t know quite what to say, but I squeezed her shoulder. “When you want to talk …”
“I know.”
Then I straightened and looked around the center, assessing the losses—Crucelle, Liseal, Sebestien, and Vieria—four out of ten.
“Now?” asked Wiane hoarsely.
“We wait until forty-three tach-heads turn forty-three locials into black glass, and then we clean up.”
“The cybs?” asked Keiko.
I’d forgotten about that detail. “Sorry. We gather together enough restraint squad members from the holding areas and outliers and we round up the fifteen hundred leftover cybs. Then we clean up.” I shrugged. “I’ll lead the group here. But that will have to come later.” Later, after all the immediate cleanup and relocation.
With nothing else that I could do at that moment—and I didn’t want just to sit and watch the screen while locial after locial was devastated—I walked across the center toward the cyb subcommander. Kemra shrank in her chair.
“Are you happy, mighty cyb? You certainly got your vengeance. More than ten thousand of us for every dead cyb and marcyb. More before this is over.”
She looked blank.
“That screen was powered not just with fusactors and boosters and relays and nodes and links, but with the soul and mind of every adult demi on the planet.”
The ground shivered then, enough that I had to reach out and steady myself on the wall, despite the shock absorbers, despite the klicks of rock above and around the center.
With the second, fainter shiver I felt, I wondered. Two torps for Parwon?
I went back to the remote scanners, throwing the image on the screen.
In the screen was the rising plume of smoke that resembled, I had been told, an ancient NorAm sombrero—that was some kind of hat used by cattle tenders back when the cattle were more plentiful than the bison.
Then the knives of the backlash hit, and most of us swayed, or worse. Someone retched, and I saw Wiane collapse, more like a faint than a mental snuffing, though.
Beside her, Dorgan paled, and his face twisted,
his mind already shredding under the agonies of the few unshielded draffs dying above, of the other demis dying, and of the land itself.
Kemra looked across us, her face blank and uncomprehending, and I wanted to throttle her, except my head hurt too much to move.
Parwon was black glass, and I hoped all the draffs had left, and that the cybs hadn’t, but I suspected that Henslom had had more than enough sense to move his troops away. They would have to have moved quickly, though.
When my head cleared, I pinpointed the second tach-head. I no longer had a house, just a hilltop of black glass. Apparently, the residence of the planetary Coordinator was a military target, and I wondered how many times they’d tracked my flitter just to make sure.
Better my house than a locial. How many locials were gone? How many meleysen trees and how many more centuries would it take?
On the screen, black starbursts continued to dot the image of Old Earth, but the skies were clear, clear of cyb-ships, clear of satellite asteroid stations.
“What …” stuttered Kemra.
“No fleet. No cybs, except you and whoever Henslom and Ysslop managed to get away from Parwon and Ellay.” I nodded. “Yes, your commander nuked the locials holding his own troops.”
“But how?”
I didn’t feel like answering, and I had a lot to do. “You people never looked, never asked how we had managed. You never paid any attention. You’re like self-indulgent children.” My words snapped at her, and I should have been more patient, but with the world collapsed around us, I wasn’t feeling patient. Besides, there were people hurt, dying, and dead, and I could explain later.
I dropped back into the command seat and accessed the Parwon receiving shelter through the hard-wires. With the surface destruction, all the nets, except for the emergency net, were down.
Seborne was in charge of the receiving area, working with Maris.
“This is Coordinator Ecktor. Is Seborne there?”
A dark-eyed visage on a wiry frame looked at me through the screen. “Coordinator, Seborne didn’t make it.” The dark eyes were bloodshot, and her face twitched.
“Lictaer.” I recognized the restraint squad leader. “Are you running the receiving area?”
“No, ser. Just the console. Ferik was Seborne’s assistant.”
“Can you run him down?”
“Just a moment.”
While I waited, I wondered just how many details had been left hanging. I wanted to take care of Henslom, but that would have to wait. Hopefully, not too long.
XXXVI
I hated the command center: buried under klicks of rock, reinforced adiamante, and energy webs, it carried the smell of age, ozone, and death. But it was the only place left with links to the remaining locials, and we needed those links in order to allocate the transport that would relocate the draffs and the few demis in each surviving receiving area to undamaged locials.
Locatio had survived, and was still whining from the Ellay receiving area. “Ecktor, we’ve still got those marcybs in the canyons.”
“Once you’ve got everything cleaned up and the survivors taken care of, go out and get them. That’s what our job is.” I had less and less sympathy for whining.
“Not everyone is as strong as you are,” came a new voice over the hard netlink, one didn’t recognize.
“Sorry, I don’t—”
“You probably wouldn’t. I’m Dynise, the temporary replacement for K’gaio. I hope it’s temporary.”
“Temporary—probably for a decade.” I was sorry to hear about K’gaio. If anyone had been strong enough to survive, I would have thought it would have been her.
“Anyway,” I answered Locatio, “you’re going to have to solve this one yourself. The crisis is over. Now all we have is the immediate cleanup, and after that you won’t need a Coordinator.”
I broke the link. For a moment, I leaned back in the command seat and closed my eyes. Yslena: I hoped she was all right, but until the nets were rebuilt, there wasn’t any real way to check, and I wasn’t about to preempt the emergency system for that—not when there was nothing I could do, one way or another.
The net buzzed.
“This is Ecktor.”
“Dynise.”
“Sorry. I didn’t meant to cut you out. What can I do?”
“Actually, I was going to tell you that we’ve got two of the big shuttles bringing in a spare net repeater. We’ll have to mount it in the open temporarily, but we’ll leave the location to you.”
I knew where already. “There’s a flat expanse about a quarter klick east of the buried Deseret antenna grid—the elevation there’s about 3,100 meters. I can have a beacon there in a stan.”
“That will be fine. You won’t get the repeater until tomorrow. Since we’re sending shuttles for relocation, we can squeeze the equipment in with the food supplements for those we can’t evacuate immediately.”
After Dynise broke off, I took a deep breath. We had more than enough concentrated supplies—even sophisticated medical supplies—for the receiving areas for weeks, but the sooner people picked up their lives, the better. Those who liked the Deseret area could filter back as they could—if they liked where we decided to relocate the locial center.
In the meantime, they needed to be integrated into functioning locials elsewhere. The magshuttles were efficient, but the largest ones only carried seventy-five passengers, and most were sized for fifty or less. With three-quarters of the center population of forty locials, that worked out to five hundred to eight hundred trips per locial. While there were forty-two locials whose centers were black glass, in two cases the tach-head blast force had also taken out the receiving center. We’d lost a handful of shuttles, but I was glad I’d had the majority evacuated. They were proving themselves most useful. The problem was going to be pilot fatigue, since we’d lost a lot of pilots—more than half.
More opportunities for comptime. I offered a bitter smile to the screen that showed the blackened and steaming ruins of Parwon.
“You wanted to see him. There he is.” At the words, I turned in the swivel.
Kemra stood less than a meter away, flanked by a pale and still gaunt Lictaer. The demi restraint squad leader hadn’t totally escaped the mindblazing backlash, and her eyes occasionally twitched. Lictaer would recover, as much as any of us would recover.
“Yes?”
“What are you going to do with me? Except have me trailed everywhere?” snapped Kemra. Her fingers strayed to the cryostasis flask and miniature powerpak at her hip. Because of her comments in the ruins, I’d approved that so that she could gather limited specimens of wildflowers outside beyond the exit tunnel. I’d hoped it would keep her out of trouble, but it looked as though I’d been wrong.
“Without a guard, I can’t totally guarantee that some draff—or some demi not quite sane—won’t try to take off your head. You are a cyb, and you’re seen as the enemy—and quite a few people died.”
“You had everything evacuated, and you demis are above violence.” Her tone was cold and bitter.
“That reduced casualties, but it didn’t eliminate them. We lost two receiving centers—they held 90,000 people. Forty-two locials are black glass or slag or both.”
Lictaer glared at Kemra.
“And almost a million demis died in the backlash.”
Kemra glanced from Lictaer to me and back.
“Do you know what it took to hold that defense net? I told you once, and it didn’t seem to register.”
“That was your satellite, your asteroid stations.”
“They were only the nexial points and the power sources. Every adult demi on this planet was linked into the defense system, and we lost almost half of them.”
“Why was that necessary? You save the idiotic draffs, and you let yourselves die.” Kemra looked at me, her eyes smoldering.
“It’s simple enough. It dates to antiquity, and it’s called the Iron Law of Responsibility. Those with great power must exercise
equally great responsibility. Some people don’t choose to. Probably half the draffs on Old Earth could be demis—”
“Thirty percent,” corrected Lictaer.
“Anyway, we pay for our power and responsibility. I kept telling you that, and none of you listened. I told you in the ruins. I told you in the prairie dog town. I told you on your own ship. What does it take?” I was nearly yelling when I stopped.
“So what are you doing with me?” she asked, again not really listening.
“Send you back and hope someone listens. Send back some records of a dead fleet, and hope the message penetrates.”
“Who’s going to listen to dead cybs?” Kemra lashed out. “Who’s going to listen to just me?”
“Who said you were the only survivor? There are several hundred marcybs and their officers running around loose. Once we take care of them, there should be a few survivors, and we’ll send you all home.”
I looked at Lictaer. “Take her somewhere. If you can get her to listen, be my guest. If not, just keep her safe until we can get a ship ready.”
Lictaer nodded.
“You’re impossible,” Kemra said. “You’re living in a past that never was. You don’t understand life. You just don’t understand.”
After rubbing my forehead—I still had splitting headaches, but most demis had the same problems I did—I answered tiredly. “No. You don’t understand. You had every opportunity. You didn’t want to listen or see. You struck first, and we didn’t even raise a defense until after you struck. I also might add that, if you send another fleet, based on your past efforts, its appearance is a violation of the Construct. In simple terms, if the next thing we see from Gates is a fleet, we don’t have to wait.”
“You’re hypocrites.”
“No.” They were the hypocrites, but arguing wasn’t going to change Kemra’s mind, and there was no point in continuing the discussion. I nodded tiredly.
“Let’s go,” said Lictaer.
“You live in your own dead world, with your own dead Morgen!” Kemra lunged at me, and her fingernails sliced at my temple.
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