It was Alik who’d insisted they run the portal breakdown con on at least five habitats simultaneously, so just one emergency didn’t seem suspicious. So far it was working, with three Deliverance ships continuing relentlessly for McDivitt.
Kandara reached the broad plaza at the foot of the endcap and studied the habitation section directly ahead. The start of the public area was behind the crystalline canopy projecting out from the wall, where it rested on top of a high, curving colonnade.
Zapata splashed the Deliverance ships’ flight data on her tarsus lenses as she hurried forward. The big vessels were finishing their deceleration maneuver, sliding to rest relative to the habitat. They glided around the cylinder’s midsection until they were equidistant, then fired their energy beams.
As she passed under the colonnade, she watched the feed showing the tenuous aurora of the shield start to brighten toward a vivid sunrise red. A massive hall stretched out ahead of her, extending ten stories high, its ground-level walls made from wide arches that led back to various function areas. With the main power off, auxiliary lighting had made it a gloomy place where shadows stole out of alcoves to repel the light from the axis spindle. The gloaming seemed to enhance the silence that had claimed it, making her clumping footsteps profoundly intrusive. Above her, balconies swept around the enclosure, linked by Italianate white marble stairs. Zapata splashed her a floorplan, which she used to refine the operation.
“Three and Four to the plaza, by the fountain,” she ordered. Two of her bioborg entourage started walking to the position she indicated. The bioborgs were near-perfect human replicas, used by police and security teams to perform public-area arrests of armed suspects. Electromorphic musculature was arranged over a boron-aluminum skeleton, with an artificial skin maintained at thirty-six degrees Celsius. They even inhaled and exhaled, in case a suspect’s altme was scanning for anomalies. Deploying them meant that the target wouldn’t realize they were surrounded until too late, unlike a SWAT squad charging at them in full body armor, nerve-block pistols waving around overenthusiastically. That was the kind of scenario that resulted in civilian casualties, whereas bioborgs were built to take plenty of punishment and still keep functioning.
Three and Four were intended for infiltration operations. And right from the start Kandara had found herself unnerved by them, which was stupid. But…they’d been built as five-year-old girls—Three with straight ebony hair in bunches, Four with cute curls. Both of them were wearing pretty girly dresses, bestowing the human illusion with even greater resonance. The fact that their electromorphic muscles were as strong as any adult creeped her out, too. They’d stepped into life right out of a Hong Kong horror interactive, the kind of demonspawn you’d find Sumiko battling against.
“One and Two, wait under the colonnade,” she instructed when she reached the bottom of a staircase.
That pair were the adults. One, the female version, was wearing a blue dress; while Two, the male, was attired in shorts and a t-shirt. As Kandara watched them move away, she noticed Two’s t-shirt had underarm sweat stains. It was an impressive level of realism. Almost as good as Jessika and Soćko, she thought maliciously.
“I’m heading up,” she told Yuri. “We’ll start setting up in the food hall next to the Piang gallery.”
Kandara started climbing one of the grandiose staircases, with the trollez following behind, their flex wheels jolting them over every step. As they reached the first-floor balcony she checked on the Deliverance ships’ assault. McDivitt’s shield was suffering acutely under the triple energy strike, its boundary seething like a phosphorescent stormfront. Sparkling spumes whirled off into space as the vapor’s cohesion started to break down.
“Estimated time until shield collapse is twenty-three minutes,” Zapata reported.
Kandara wasn’t so sure—the attack looked ferocious to her—but didn’t say anything. She went into the abandoned food hall with its long stalls of exotic dishes. Cool and dark now, the overripe vegetables were starting to wrinkle and soften. She was glad her helmet filters were cleaning the air they fed her.
The back of the hall had five doors leading to corridors and storerooms and utility service compartments. She walked along, examining them and cross-referencing with the floorplan, until she reached the rear of the habitation section.
“The corridor’s a constant two point seven meters wide,” she said, reading from her sensor splash. “Are you sure about the sphere measurement?”
“Three point two meters,” Yuri said. He sounded amused.
“Just making sure. It’s a long way to come and get it wrong.”
“The walls there are a mixture of rock-epoxy sheets pinned onto foamsteel beams,” Alik said. “Tough as it comes. Relax, this is going to work out just fine.”
Kandara grinned. “Says the man sitting in the office.” She pressed a gauntlet against the rear wall, feeling its presence. It was part of the massive habitat shell itself: re-bonded rock fifty meters thick, woven with a multilayered mesh of steel and aluminum tapes as thick as her leg. Strong enough to last until we build a Dyson sphere around Sol, the designers boasted.
“This is where we’ll take it,” she announced. Zapata ordered one of the trollez forward. It stopped before her, and a threader mechanism rose out of its pannier. The first portal swung into position.
* * *
—
Alpha Defense predicted correctly. McDivitt’s shield lasted a full twenty-seven minutes under the energy beam assault inflicted by the Deliverance ships. The twelve atomic binding generators studded across the shell of the habitat cylinder were already drastically overstressed when the first major component failure happened. It triggered a cascade of failures. With one generator blown, the others tried to assume the loading, which quickly resulted in multiple burnouts. The precious envelope of ions flash-burst out from McDivitt in a tempest of super-energized vapor that lasted barely a couple of seconds.
The three Deliverance ships closed in. They twisted around their long axis until their flat underbellies faced the habitat shell, then began to curve sideways through space—an impressive maneuver that saw them match the habitat rotation. That was when they closed the gap and attached themselves to the surface of the shell.
Alpha Defense had received the feeds from a dozen habitats the Deliverance ships had captured before. The procedure was always the same. Some kind of cutter tool or beam powered up from the Deliverance ship, rupturing the shell, emerging from the landscape in a volcanic punch of rock particles and soil. Thousands of tiny flying ovoids, their composition blurred between biology and cybernetics, swarmed up out of the hole and began to spread out, scouting the interior. Then it was only a matter of minutes until the habitat network crashed and the feeds cut off. General Johnston had emplaced spydrones in the last three habitats to fall, using entanglement communications that weren’t dependent on solnet. The intelligence they gathered was limited.
Within minutes of the habitat network crash, the Olyix would turn off the axial light. Normally nighttime in a habitat was accompanied by a small glimmer from above as the axis lights mimicked the radiance of a new moon. But without any light at all, the interior was shockingly dark. Thermo regulators were also deactivated—an action that would slowly kill the biosphere as the cylinder radiated its heat away over the coming months. If any humans had been left behind, their choice was now limited to surrender or gradually freezing to death.
The spydrones used passive thermal imaging to see what happened next. The invasion had played out the same way in all three habitats. Hundreds of glossy metallic spheres, just over three meters in diameter, came surging up out of the entry hole—presumably some kind of mini armored vehicle for an Olyix quint, crammed full of systems that could subdue a fleeing human. They would spread out across the habitat, driving fast over the cylindrical landscape, searching for anybody who hadn’t made it out in time. Th
e longest a spydrone had lasted during that phase was three hours, seventeen minutes.
Kandara and her team reckoned she had a window of fifteen to twenty minutes before the Olyixs’ tiny flying scouts noticed the mechanisms that the power technicians had installed around the base of the axis spindle. That gave her ten minutes for bioborgs One and Two to be spotted, while apparently desperate to avoid just that.
As sensors picked up severe vibrations from the Deliverance ships cutting through McDivitt’s shell, she stood on the balcony outside the food hall and ran a final suit check. She wasn’t taking any chances. The suit had four inner layers, starting with thermal regulation, then a self-sealing pressure membrane, then a thermal resistance layer, which Connexion’s armorers had greatly enhanced to prevent any external heat getting through to cook her. The last inner layer was a lacework of electromorphic muscle bands, allowing her to move fast and jump high. She reckoned she was going to need it. Over everything else went a hard carapace in articulated segments made of reactive-molecule armor plating with an integral energy dissipater mesh. Then Jessika had added an external strata of the übercarbon produced in her lab’s initiators, promising it would protect the suit from the web weapons that had been used in Kings Cross—adding even more to the suit’s weight. So much so that without the electromorphic muscle taking the strain, she wouldn’t have been able to stand up, let alone walk.
Her backpack fed power and munitions to the guns on her forearms. Not that she expected to use them—apart from one. She brought up her left forearm to inspect an additional barrel that had been affixed. It was twenty centimeters long and contained one thing: the blue cylinder that Jessika had given her, which—in theory—would jam a quint’s entanglement to its other four bodies.
The suppressor had to be fired at the right time for the whole snatch scheme to work. They needed a quint, out of its vehicle and alone, at the same time as the rest of the habitat was being obliterated. That way its other bodies would assume it had been lost when all the quint inside were killed. Kandara would spirit it away directly to Jessika and Soćko via portal, who would use their neurovirus on it. And the fight back would begin.
It was a bold plan. If your definition of bold is plain batshit crazy.
Even now she got the cold shivers thinking about how audacious they were being. As soon as the spheres emerged and the axis light failed, bioborgs Three and Four would use torches out on the plaza. The Olyix flying scouts would see it and direct the nearest spheres to head straight for them. Bioborgs One and Two, distraught parents that they were, would appear, and the whole family would run for cover—right up the stairs and into the food hall, vanishing into a corridor at the back. Kandara had chosen that specific corridor because it was too narrow for the sphere to follow. The quint driving it would have to get out and chase the fugitives itself. If there was more than one sphere coming after them, then the four bioborgs would split up and each run down a separate corridor. Armed drones under Zapata’s control would take out the little flying scouts and any other airborne systems accompanying the pursuing quint, while strategically placed charges would seal off the ambush corridor behind them. Then finally, just before the quint reached the portal to the ultra-secure security reception cell waiting in Connexion’s Arizona facility, Kandara would fire the entanglement suppresser, along with a nerve-block pulse that Jessika claimed would work on a quint nervous system. And if not, if it came to using firepower to subdue it, Kandara had a lot of confidence in her own weapons, which included heavy-duty tangle rounds that would smother the quint in foam and lasso cords. The idea of rolling a quint through the portal, cemented inside a giant beach ball, was one that had a dark appeal.
There were plenty of maybes in there, but they’d worked out a fallback for each one, and the overall idea was sound. If they could just get one alone…
“Here they come,” Yuri said.
Kandara’s splash showed her three mini-volcanoes rising up out of the cylinder landscape amid a maelstrom of stone fragments. The rubble was still falling when the little ovoid scout gadgets came flooding out of the gaping holes. Even though they were fifteen kilometers away, Kandara felt her adrenaline ramp up. She quickly checked her gland, making sure its output hadn’t fallen too much now that she’d dialed it down. If there was ever a time to lose all restrictions, this was it. Splash icons showed that her neurochemistry was under control, but its grip on her deep daemons was loosening. Her anger with the Olyix was intensifying, paired with the excitement at the prospect of physical confrontation. After days of endless meetings and planning, things were finally heading toward a resolution.
“I’m going to take up position,” she said. “Don’t want to be seen here.”
“Roger that. Good luck.”
“Yeah,” Alik said. “Break a leg.”
“That’s for actors going onstage, asshole.”
“Okay, so break one of their legs.” He laughed.
“Consider that favor in the bag.”
“We’re still playing the long con,” Yuri reported. “As far as the Olyix know, there’re a lot of panicky humans in McDivitt terrified they’re about to be captured.”
“As long as you’ve still got control of the solarwells this’ll work just fine,” she said as she turned and headed back into the food hall.
“They’re all entangled channels. All I have to do is press this big red button.”
“Thanks, Yuri. Let’s do this.”
“Here come the big boys,” Alik said.
The dark spheres were now surging up out of the holes that the Deliverance ships had rammed through the habitat shell. An hour earlier, Connexion security had released a swarm of bees into McDivitt’s interior. The insects had synthetic eight-letter DNA to give them bioneural circuitry instead of a natural brain, as well as enhanced visual reception. Individually each bee had a limited view, but linked they were a multifaceted eye with prodigious focus.
Kandara paused midstep as a high-resolution image splashed across her tarsus lenses. “I can’t see a track around those spheres they’re using. But they’re moving fast.”
“They’re not rolling along, either,” Yuri said.
“Then how’s—” She ordered Zapata to zoom in, concentrating on the bottom of the sphere. There was a small gap between it and the ground. “Mother Mary! Is that thing flying?”
The image pulled back, revealing that a group of spheres had risen far above the holes in the shell to skim across the treetops.
“Shit,” Alik spat. “Okay, so they fly. It doesn’t change the basics of the operation. Everything’s just going to be quicker is all.”
“You think?”
“Kandara,” Jessika said, “the Olyix may be using a miniature variant of their gravitonic drive in those vehicles.”
“If they have miniaturized the drive, then our information is out of date,” Soćko countered.
“Hey, you two!” Kandara snapped. “Less nerdism, more practicality.”
“Okay. Sorry,” Jessika said. “But it means Alik is right. They’ll be able to move fast.”
“What else is out of date?” Alik demanded.
“Unknown,” Soćko replied meekly.
“Dammit,” Kandara grunted and turned back.
“What are you doing?” Yuri demanded.
“Repositioning the bioborgs. If those spheres can fly, we need to rethink the distance the children have to run.”
“All right. But be careful.”
“Middle name.”
“Ha. I’ve seen your file.”
Kandara arrived back at the balcony and jogged along it toward the giant crystalline canopy that fronted the public hall. The bee swarm visualization was showing her a continuing procession of quint spheres pouring out of the holes. The majority were heading straight for the endcaps. During previous habitat invasions they’d spread out in
formation to scour the cylindrical landscape before swirling around the habitation sections.
“Mother Mary,” she muttered. “They are fast.” Zapata gave her an estimate of four minutes before the first ones reached the plaza. She brought her gaze back to the plaza, where two small figures in sweet dresses stood motionless beside a big bronze statue fountain. “Crap.” A less childlike pose she couldn’t imagine. “Three and Four,” she ordered. “Start moving back to the public hall now. One and Two, go grab them, make it frantic.”
The two small bioborgs began a reasonably realistic run across the plaza, holding hands and calling for their parents.
“Kandara!” Yuri warned.
She saw it in the splash from the bees. The leading spheres started to speed up, their wake rippling the tallest tree fronds as they soared over them.
“Abort! Get the fuck out of there!”
She turned and began hurrying back to the food hall. “This might still work.”
“There are fifteen of those fuckers heading for you. Just get out.”
“I’m going for the portal. But at least see what happens to the bioborgs before we cancel.”
“Crap! All right, we’re reviewing.”
By the time she reached the food hall her heart was palpitating as if it’d been hit by a defibrillator charge. Back on the plaza, the four bioborgs had all met up underneath the colonnade in a hectic family reunion. Arms pointed in shock at the approaching Olyix spheres above the jungle, then the parents grasped their children firmly, hauling them along. Even Kandara was impressed by the authenticity of the performance.
“They might just make—”
Violet energy beams ripped out of the two lead spheres. Flame engulfed the bioborgs as clothes ignited, their bodies dissolving into carbonized slag. Abdominal power cells ruptured, ripping open what was left of their torsos.
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