Salvation Lost

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “True.”

  “All right. Worst-case scenario, I go through alone—”

  “People living in London might disagree with your ratings system, there.”

  “Shut up! I go through. You’re left here. As soon as I’m on the other side, we re-thread. You take the twenty-centimeter portal with you; I make damn sure it stays powered up and the entanglement is maintained.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “I’m Ainsley fucking Zangari’s granddaughter. I am a Connexion executive board member, and I’m going to be running part of the exodus habitat project. I can do it, or people will be wishing they were cocooned.”

  He swayed back, only half joshing. “Damn, I always fall for the so-pretty-so-she’s-gotta-be-sweet delusion.”

  “And don’t you forget it, mister. Because when I’ve built those exodus habitats, you’re going to be in a first-class cabin to the stars.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  * * *

  —

  Gwendoline spent the afternoon reviewing routes from her penthouse to the Bermondsey Spa Gardens where Horatio had his flat. Skycabez were out, because the police had shut down all airborne traffic except for their own drones. That left taxez and cabez, which a lot of companies weren’t letting out of the garage because of the damage inflicted by the anti-cocoon mobs during the last two days. Cycling, which Horatio laughed at when she suggested trying to order one for delivery. And walking.

  “Eight kilometers,” he said. “Two hours max. Easy.”

  “Not easy. Half the streets have no-gathering notices imposed, and there’s plenty of looting. I need to find you a safe route. And I think I’ve got it.”

  “Where?”

  “You walk down the river.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No. There’s no water in it anymore, not at this end, anyway. It’ll be like one of those old motorways they used to have.”

  Theano had been splashing real-time situation maps from Connexion security. One of the first things she noticed was where all the water from the Thames outside the penthouse had gone. The eastward flow had pooled against the shield at Tilbury, rising to the top of its banks. It still looked full from there all the way back to Thamesmead, where it had spilled over to flood the Rainham marshes.

  That made her check the satellite imagery. Outside the shield, seven days’ worth of river water had quickly filled the Wraysbury reservoirs. The overspill had probed its way along the edge of the shield, finding the easiest route and flooding down it. Now the entire river was pouring through the fields and woods that ringed the southwestern quarter of London, cutting deep channels through the soil as it sought a way around the implacable boundary. A vast new lake was expanding southward across the land, drowning forests and the elaborate manor houses that sat inside their tasteful clearings. Foxes, badgers, squirrels, rabbits, and a dozen other kinds of confused forest creatures were scampering ahead of the scummy leading edge as it advanced ominously.

  “I wonder if they’ll find a new home,” she mused as they watched the feed together.

  “Easier than humans will,” Horatio said. “I’m not the greatest mathematician, but even I know we can’t all escape to these exodus habitats Loi’s talking about. The numbers are impossible. There’re billions of us.”

  “There must be a way. Loi sounded very confident about whatever plan the committee has drawn up.”

  “I hope so, but self-preservation changes people’s behavior. There’s very little humans won’t stoop to if they are threatened.”

  “I won’t let them,” she said fiercely. “We will not abandon you. I promise.”

  “No. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. The populations of the settled systems might make it, but Earth…We need to come to terms with what’s going to happen to us.”

  She clamped her hands over his ears, forcing him to look at her fierce stare. “Not you. There will be a way. And I will find it. I promise you that.”

  * * *

  Alpha Defense tracked the armada of Deliverance ships approaching Earth in a line that stretched for nearly two hundred thousand kilometers, all of them decelerating so they would match the planet’s orbital velocity as they closed to within a thousand kilometers of the surface. Earth’s weapons platforms were maneuvered so six of the nine would be over the Indian Ocean when the first of the invaders arrived. Supreme Commander Johnston was under no illusion they’d survive, but an early blow against the Deliverance ships would be good for morale. Defense analysts were more interested in the data the brief conflict would provide, revealing more about the Olyix capabilities.

  With less than an hour to go, the first two Deliverance ships began to change course.

  “What are they doing?” Horatio asked.

  Gwendoline shrugged. “Don’t ask me.”

  Like the rest of the planet, they watched the two sleek shapes accelerate toward the Moon. G8Turings projected their course, showing them streaking over the surface in a shallow parabola, coming down to ten kilometers directly over Theophilus crater.

  “Oh, crap!” Gwendoline exclaimed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “That’s where Alpha Defense put its primary Command Center.”

  “How the hell do you know that? Surely it’s secret!”

  “Sol Senate category one clearance only, yes. Connexion has contracts with Alpha Defense for several ultra-grade projects.”

  “You never told me.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Category one. Clue’s in the name.”

  “Oh. Right. Sorry. But the Olyix clearly know about it.”

  “Yeah, and that’s got to hurt.”

  When the two Deliverance ships were a thousand kilometers out, they began firing missiles. After they’d launched twelve each, the ships changed course again, taking them away from a Theophilus crater overflight.

  The first missile struck five kilometers to the north of the central mountain. A nuclear plasma ball erupted, swiftly expanding over the triple-peaked mountain. Theano splashed the sensor data accrued from high-orbit satellites.

  “That cannot be right,” Gwendoline muttered. “Five hundred megatons? Five hundred?”

  The second missile pierced the hazy plume of super-energized vapor and slammed into the base of the mountain. Another plasma ball soared out, carrying with it an immense storm of rock fragments. By the time the seventh detonated, the terraced rim of the crater was shaking violently, setting off vast avalanches of regolith that cascaded down the irregular ledges to smack onto the floor as a dusty spume.

  The missile impacts continued relentlessly. Their explosions inflated a massive cloud of regolith and molten basalt chunks over the crater. Every few seconds it was tormented by a new energy flare as another warhead struck.

  “Five hundred looks right to me,” Horatio said. “Christ, what’ll happen if they attack the shields with those?”

  That particular ultra-classified data was already being splashed across Gwendoline’s tarsus lenses from an obscure Alpha Defense nuclear analysis group. “They’ll punch straight through,” she said. “And take out the entire city along with any buildings, forests, and people for a hundred and fifty kilometers in every direction.”

  “Time to thread up, then.”

  “They won’t use them on cities,” she said, wishing it was fact, not dubious speculation.

  The last missile hit Theophilus crater; its hundred-kilometer diameter was now obscured by the assault’s toxic cloud of rubble, dust, and hyper-charged vapor, bulging more than thirty kilometers high. The debris was lit from within by tremendous lightning discharges that looked like a continuing chain of explosions.

  Theano splashed a status update from Alpha Defense. “They took out the Command Center,” she said wearily.

  “But Alpha Defense has other centers,
right?”

  “Of course.”

  “So it was overkill for no purpose.”

  “No, it was propaganda. The Olyix are showing their strength.”

  The remainder of the Deliverance armada continued their descent toward Earth. Waiting for them were the six weapons platforms in their ten-thousand-kilometer orbit, three of them traversing the African coast as they followed their orbital track eastward, one coming around from Antarctica, with the remaining two heading over from Iran and India.

  With the Deliverance ships crossing over geostationary orbit, the platforms powered up their shields, enveloping themselves in a six-hundred-meter sphere of sparkling gold haze. The lead Deliverance ship launched twenty-four missiles down at them. In response, the platforms activated their railguns. Each gun fired two hundred rounds per second along their hundred-and-fifty-meter length, accelerating every bullet to a final velocity of fifty kilometers per second. The platforms didn’t carry any bullets on board; they came into the railgun’s feed mechanism via portal from huge reserve bunkers distributed across defense bases all over Earth—which gave them effectively unlimited munitions. With each platform sporting eight railguns, forty-eight dense swarms of hyper-velocity projectiles hurtled up toward the attackers in unending torrents. The missiles’ acceleration fluctuated wildly as they tried to evade the near-solid rivers of metal stabbing up at them.

  The railguns didn’t have to be accurate; the sheer quantity of bullets flung out constituted a barrier that guaranteed a strike no matter how widely the Olyix missiles tracked away from their original flight path. As the first bullets closed on the missiles, it was obvious that they had some kind of short-range defense mechanism; the bullets twisted out of alignment with only a few meters to go before impact. But while the deflector system could cope with an occasional potential strike, they were soon overwhelmed. At their phenomenal closing velocity, it took only the slightest graze for a bullet to obliterate a missile. Within thirty seconds, all twenty-four were destroyed.

  “So we can damage them,” Horatio said. “They’re not invincible.”

  “That was nothing,” Gwendoline contradicted. “Our worthless counter-propaganda.”

  They watched the twelve lead Deliverance ships accelerate smoothly, changing course to take them around the confluence of weapons platforms. They split into pairs, which matched each platform’s orbital track, then closed in to within five hundred kilometers. The platforms did nothing as they slid inexorably eastward, their orbits carrying them toward Australia. The Deliverance ships fired X-ray lasers, the same kind they’d deployed against habitat shields and then MHD asteroids. All six platform shields soaked up the energy pumped into them, blooming into golden mini suns, bathing the Indian Ocean in a primeval dawn. The Deliverance ships slid in closer, like cautious predator beasts, and the six platforms fired their gamma ray lasers simultaneously. The beam focus chambers were one-shot, decaying instantly from the radiation backwash. But before they died, they converted fifty thousand megawatts into an ultra-hard gamma beam, each directed at the heart of a Deliverance ship. Designed to target objects moving with a colossal velocity relative to Earth, the Deliverance ships—in their matching orbital paths—enabled the platforms to hold the gamma beam on them for the full quarter of a second of their existence. The results were spectacular. Four Deliverance ships exploded, and five had giant holes torn into their fuselages, spilling out molten debris and ionized atmosphere. The remaining three simply died, carrying on along their orbit, but beginning a slow tumble that would last for decades until they finally succumbed to atmospheric resistance and disintegrated in the mesosphere.

  Above the carnage, a batch of ten Deliverance ships accelerated hard, their dark fuselages turning a perfect silver as they raced toward the platforms. This time they went in low, curving under the thousand-kilometer altitude mark before closing in. The platforms had only short-defense weapons capable of pointing downward. Twenty missiles leaped toward them. The megaton warheads detonated in a harmonized blast, creating a ferocious rosette of interlocking plasmaspheres around the platforms. The thermosphere flared in response, and dazzling auroral ripples over a hundred kilometers in diameter burned their way through the tenuous gas. Beneath that, the ocean reflected the actinic light, turning the air to a pale solar photosphere.

  Deliverance ship energy beams slammed out, puncturing the radiation vortex with superb accuracy. A second wave of nuclear-tipped missiles streaked in to within thirty kilometers of the platforms before exploding. Platform shields failed within seconds, unable to withstand the intense assault. Above the ocean, the atmosphere shimmered in torment as it was broiled by the radiation. Plumes of superheated air began their deadly amalgamation into storm swirls, spinning faster than anything the planet had known before.

  Through the emerging maelstrom, the long line of Deliverance ships descended.

  Perth was the first city. A clean urban jewel sitting on Australia’s coast, it was protected by eight interlocking oval shields that stretched for seventy kilometers end to end, and forty deep. High waves were already slapping at the waterside edge of the shields when seven Deliverance ships came sliding out of the wounded sky at hypersonic velocity, curving around as they lost speed, to deliver a salvo of sonic booms that went unheard by the residents below. The big streamlined craft spread out to encircle the city, then landed a kilometer from the shield boundary, with one coming down on Rottnest Island. One by one they fired energy beams at the shield domes.

  Every human on Earth accessing the feed held their breath. The air above the shield began to glow as static webs danced around the strike points, shivering down the dome to ground out in a continuous roar. Columns of searing air fountained up high into the atmosphere, mushrooming out at gale force to repel the clouds rushing in from the sea. The domes themselves began to glow with crimson stress as their enhanced atomic bonds were abused by the severe energy input. But they held.

  * * *

  —

  “For how long?” Horatio asked.

  “Don’t know. The shield generators weren’t exactly designed with continual use in mind. But it looks like Ainsley’s people were right. Those energy beams are being fired at an upward angle. If the shield fails, they won’t hit the ground. The Olyix want us alive.”

  “There’s a shitload of energy saturating the air outside, not to mention heat. If the shields go, it’ll all come hammering down on Perth.”

  “Yes. Which is why they’ve not cranked the power level up even further; those beams aren’t operating at anything like the power they used to attack the MHD asteroids. It’s a balancing act. And they can keep it up indefinitely. Something will have to give in the end. It’s going to be a race between generator failure and us building something that can strike back at them.”

  “That won’t be us,” he said. “Not in the Sol system. If there’s any resistance, it’ll have to come from the terraformed worlds.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s what you’re going to be working on. I’m depending on you, Gwendoline. Come save us.”

  The time for smart, funny, teasing answers was long over. They sat together on the sofa, holding hands as they watched the never-ending stream of Deliverance ships drop out of the sky.

  In the first hour, three of them shot west over the Indian Ocean to Madagascar, circling Antananarivo. The city’s shield generators had been sabotaged back on the twenty-sixth of June, within hours of the assessment team returning from Nkya. Armed teams had blown up three of the buildings housing the generators, reducing them to rubble. The authorities had been struggling to install replacements ever since.

  Gwendoline watched in dismay as hatches opened across the underbelly of each Deliverance ship. Small spheres dropped out. At first she assumed they were some kind of bombs, then they changed direction and began to form up in a loose circle around the city. There were over a thousand of
them in the air, when they dropped down to a few meters altitude and began to fly nimbly along the streets.

  People ran, but it was no use. The spheres were a lot faster, soaring along the roads and wider avenues. Cybernetic serpents like slim lengths of dark rope came whirling down like bolos. When they landed on someone, they wrapped around tight. Gwendoline winced as she watched one man struggle and yell in terror against one that had coiled around his arms, pinning them to his sides. A couple of friends raced over to help, trying to pry the thing free. The tapered ends stabbed into his flesh, one into his abdomen, the other into his bicep. Blood bloomed against his clothes, and the friends backed away, staring in horror as the tips wormed their way deeper into his body. He sank to his knees, grimacing. The serpent stopped, and the tips slowly withdrew.

  Another of the agile machines slithered fast along the ground, rearing up to coil around one of the friend’s legs. He screamed as it stabbed into his hips.

  “What the fuck!” Horatio exclaimed. “Are those things killing them?”

  “I don’t think so. Loi told me…” She took a breath, forcing the words out. “There were cases where Olyix agents injected Kcells into human bodies.”

  “Oh, sweet Christ.”

  The Olyix serpents spared no one, and children were easy targets. They watched in helpless fury as parents struggled desperately to free their pinioned kids only for the serpents to coil around them as well. The strategy was well thought out, and effective. Citizens armed with ancient weapons and modern peripherals fought a losing battle against the tide of slender monsters wriggling along the city streets. Sections of Antananarivo’s already heavily glitched solnet began to drop out. By then it didn’t really matter. Perth and Antananarivo were being repeated every minute as the Deliverance ships continued to come. Most cities with shields held firm against their energy beams. Some collapsed in the first minute, wreaking havoc on the buildings abruptly exposed to the overheated atmosphere that thumped down. Olyix spheres flowed down into the ruins, hunting humans struggling to flee—