“You wanted alternatives,” Natasha said in an accusing tone.
“Our detector network has now found thirty-eight wormholes close to the target stars,” Anna said.
Wilson’s virtual finger reached for the Tokyo’s icon. He stopped. He hated, absolutely hated, himself for doing this. But this whole attack was pivotal. Any and every action he took today could decide the fate of the Commonwealth. He had to have information he could trust implicitly. That meant the source must be someone he knew he could trust. He touched the Dublin’s icon. “Oscar?”
“Hello, Admiral.”
“We need to know what’s coming through that wormhole close to the star.”
“Hysradar is picking up returns consistent with class-four and class-seven Prime ships. We launched a pair of Douvoir missiles to close it down.”
“I know, but we need confirmation. Take a flyby. Stay in hyperspace, but get us a high-definition picture of what the bastards are up to.”
“You want us to leave Hanko orbit?”
“Yes, the planetary defenses can insure no wormholes open close by. If the invasion pattern changes you can return immediately.”
“Acknowledged, leaving orbit now.”
“Boongate reports a wormhole near its star,” Anna said. “That’s completion, all forty-eight stars. Whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it to each star system they’re invading. Large numbers of ships coming through.”
“The Prime ships must have damn good force fields to operate at that distance from a star,” Rafael said. “It’s hellish close.”
“Can the Moscow-class fly in that close?” Wilson asked. He’d automatically assumed the Dublin would be in trouble if they were in real space a mere half-million kilometers from a G-class star.
“Yes,” Tunde said. “But I wouldn’t recommend an extended combat time in such an environment. The stress level on the force field would undoubtedly lead to overload.”
“Same for the Prime ships, then,” Rafael said.
“Undoubtedly.”
“What are they up to?” Wilson whispered. His virtual hands rearranged the imagery icons, and the office’s tactical display shrank slightly to accommodate the hysradar return from the Dublin. Four hundred eighty thousand kilometers above Hanko’s star, the Prime wormhole was holding steady. Over fifty ships were through now. The pair of Douvoir missiles Oscar had launched were closing fast. Ten seconds from impact, the wormhole closed.
“It’s opening again,” Tunde said, scanning the projection. “Twenty million kilometers away.”
“Douvoir missiles locking on,” Anna said. “Nothing’s coming through yet.”
The Dublin’s hysradar return was showing sixty-three Prime ships accelerating hard from the point where they’d emerged. Each of them was firing a flock of high-acceleration missiles. The expanding globe of hardware was already five thousand kilometers across. Nuclear explosions began to blink around the periphery. The hysradar image immediately broke up into an uneven hash.
“What’s happening?” Wilson asked.
“Interference,” Oscar reported. “The nukes are somehow pumping out exotic energy pulses. It’s screwing with our hysradar.”
“That’s certainly one diverted-energy-function we haven’t got,” Tunde said. “A direct inversion to an exotic state. Natasha?”
“Well, it’s obviously possible,” Natasha said; she sounded more intrigued than alarmed. “I don’t understand how the mechanism holds together under those conditions.”
“You’re missing the point,” Dimitri said.
“Which is?” Natasha asked with cool politeness.
“They’re going to a great deal of effort to hide something from us above those stars.” He indicated the image from the Dublin, which showed the star’s vast curvature. The uniformity of the image was broken by a shimmering patch of silver and yellow particles that obscured over half of the surface. “This is the only sensor blind spot in the star system. Something is going on behind that interference, something they clearly consider extremely important to their attack.”
“The Primes are generating identical interference patterns in the other systems,” Anna said. “It’s a constant pattern.”
“Oscar,” Wilson said, “we have to know what they’re covering up.” He hoped the tension wasn’t showing in his voice. But if the Primes did have something equal or even superior to quantumbusters this war was already over. A lot of his family would leave on the lifeboats that were in the last stages of assembly above Los Vada. If they have time to reach them. He assumed he’d be relatively safe on the High Angel, though God alone knew where it would fly away to.
“Roger that,” Oscar said. “Standard sensors are useless this close to a star. We’re going in closer.”
“Good luck,” Wilson told him.
The first tremor caught Oscar by surprise. His heart jumped in response. “What the hell was that?”
The others were all lifting their heads from the flight couches, checking around the cabin. For what, Oscar couldn’t imagine. A crack in the hull that was letting in solar wind? Crap. He’d always known and accepted that any attack powerful enough to have a physical impact on the starship would simply destroy it. Now another judder ran through the vessel, stronger this time—and they were still intact and alive. “Somebody talk to me.”
“I think the exotic energy blasts from their diverted-energy-function nukes just hit our wormhole,” Dervla said. “I’m certainly seeing a lot of unusual fluctuations around our compression dynamic wavefront.”
“Oh, great,” Oscar said. “A new threat. How badly can that hurt us?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “We never covered anything like this in training. It don’t think it can break our boundary.”
A shudder made Oscar tense his whole body as the couch straps vibrated against him. It was like riding a white-water raft. The hologram display wobbled as his eyes tried to focus. He switched to virtual vision for primary information. Just in time, as the next judder shook his body. Curses were mumbled through the narrow operations segment.
“Ten seconds to the missile formation,” Hywel said.
Oscar consulted the navigational grid. They were flying toward a star at nearly four times the speed of light. He wanted to say something to Dervla about making sure their course was correct, but harassing people at inappropriate moments wasn’t the sign of good captaincy. So he trusted her with his life.
She was taking the Dublin in a long curve to solar south of the Prime incursion, heading past them to an altitude of four hundred thousand kilometers above the star. The shaking began to reduce as they left the explosive umbrella behind.
Their hysradar image began to sharpen as Hywel and the RI brought filter programs on-line. Now the exotic energy pulses were displayed as black circular wavefronts, fading as they expanded. “The ships are still in there,” Hywel said. “And they’re expending missiles at a phenomenal rate even by Prime standards. Oh. Wait—” The image shifted drastically as he instructed the RI to shift the main focus a hundred eighty degrees. “What’s that?”
In the middle of the projection, a lone dot was rushing headlong into the star.
Oscar read the associated figures. “Dear God, that’s a hundred-gee acceleration.”
“Two minutes until it reaches the corona,” Hywel said. “What is that?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t like it at all. Wilson, are you receiving our hysradar data?”
“Yes,” the answer came back. “Can you hit it with a Douvoir missile?”
“Not that close to a solar mass,” Reuben said. “The gravity curvature is too strong.”
“He’s right,” Dervla said. “Our wormhole generator is having trouble maintaining boundary integrity this close. There’s a lot of gravitonic distortion.”
“Oscar, we have got to know what that device is going to do,” Wilson said. “Can you drop out of FTL and observe with standard sensors, please.”
Oscar he
ard at least two sharp pulls of breath inside the operations section. “Roger that, stand by for full sensor observation.”
“Just how good is our force field?” Hywel muttered.
“It can stand this proximity,” Teague said. “But we need to avoid combat with the Prime ships.”
“I’ll try and remember that,” Oscar said dryly. “Okay, Dervla, take us out of the wormhole. Hywel, full sensor scan as soon as we’re in real space.”
“Aye, sir.”
Oscar couldn’t help himself; his body braced as the FTL drive opened the wormhole and the Dublin slid out into real space. Nothing happened. No blinding white light and intolerable heat flooding through the cabin. Damn, I’m twitchy. He blinked, and started to study the sensor imagery.
Visual sensors showed a universe of two halves. One white, one black. For an instant he was back above the Dyson Alpha barrier in the Second Chance, where space was divided into two distinct sections. This time, there was nothing passive about the sheer white surface four hundred thousand kilometers away. The star’s corona was in constant turbulent motion with waves and surges radiating a gale of particles outward; ghostly prominences danced above the seething gas, flexing and twisting in the intense magnetic field. Space above them was dotted with the neon graphics tagging Prime ships and missiles.
“They’ve seen us,” Hywel said. “Missile flight changing course. Accelerating at twenty gees.”
“How long have we got?” Oscar asked.
“Five minutes until they reach nominal engagement distance.”
“Okay. What about the device they’ve fired into the star?”
The imagery expanded as Hywel tracked the device with as many sensors as he could. It was still accelerating into the corona at a hundred gees. A long wake of swirling plasma stretched out for thousands of kilometers behind it. Shock waves rippled away from its protective force field, creating violet circles that were immediately torn apart by the raging solar wind.
“That is a very powerful force field,” Teague said. “I’m not sure we could withstand that kind of environment. It had to be built specifically for this flight.”
“So what kind of device do you send into a star?” Hywel asked, his voice edgy.
“A bad one,” Reuben said. “And I don’t care how good its force field is, it won’t survive much longer. The coronal density is picking up, and that speed will generate impacts that could puncture anything.”
“But there’s no kind of—” Hywel began. “Oh, the fusion drive has switched off.”
Oscar watched the dark speck as it drilled through the super-velocity plasma. He realized he was holding his breath. “If it’s a quantumbuster?” he asked.
“Then we’re probably dead,” Reuben said. “But even if its force field holds out until it’s within range of the chromosphere, the effect of the blast will be minimal as far as Hanko is concerned. If you’ve got them, use them against the planet directly. Don’t screw around letting them off an AU away like this.”
Oscar waited as the device streaked downward. He wondered if he had time to update his secure store. Probably not. He’d done it this morning, and decided that he probably didn’t want to remember this time in the Dublin anyway. Although…should he leave his future incarnation a message from now saying he didn’t want to remember? Stupid idea.
“Here we go,” Hywel said tersely.
Oscar was surprised to see it was the quantum signature scan that was changing. It was as if petals were unfurling from the device, giant thousand-kilometer-long ovals of altered quantum fields, overlapping and twisted. They began to rotate.
“Magnetic effect picking up,” Hywel warned.
The star’s massive flux lines were curving around the ephemeral quantum wings. Plasma followed, dragged into an elongated eddy curving around the device’s rigid wake.
“What the hell is that?” Dervla asked with quiet unease.
“Wilson?” Oscar asked. “Anyone from the Seattle Project got an opinion?” The quantum effect radiating out from the device was now five thousand kilometers in diameter. It began to speed up. The knot it was stirring up in the corona was visible to the Dublin’s heavily filtered optical sensors.
“Not yet,” Wilson replied.
“Captain,” Reuben called, “the Prime missiles are getting close. If we have to ward off some kind of energy strike from the device as well as dealing with them, we’re going to be in serious trouble.”
“Launch a countermissile salvo,” Oscar ordered. “We have to stay here and report on this.” He knew it was critical.
“One minute until it hits the upper corona,” Hywel said. “It’s having a hell of an impact on the solar wind.”
“Are you sure it can’t survive impact?”
“I don’t know. It’s changed so much, the quantum fluctuations at the core are significantly altered. I’m not sure what it is anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“It might not qualify as pure matter anymore. That distortion is very weird. It seems to be incorporating the force field, and that quantum signature—I’ve never seen anything like it.”
When Oscar consulted the sensor projection, the device’s rotating wings were now close to seven thousand kilometers wide. The operation section’s display superimposed them on the corona as black ellipses. Plasma writhed around them, hurling off dense vortices that leaped up into space, dissipating as they rose. The scale of the effect was unnerving. “If it’s not matter, then what is it?”
“Some kind of energy nexus, I think. I’m not sure. It’s having an unusual effect on the surrounding mass properties.”
The Prime device spun down into the corona. It was like watching a comet striking the atmosphere of an H-congruous planet. The star’s million-degree outer layer ruptured in a crowned plume that rose higher than any of the prominences. Continent-sized cataracts of plasma curved back down only to be warped by the twisted magnetic flux. A secondary plume rose inside the core of the first, the cooler chromosphere matter streaking up to escape from the astonishing deformation produced by the device’s impact.
“Holy shit,” Oscar grunted.
“So what good did that do them?” Dervla complained.
“That quantum effect is still functional, and growing,” Hywel reported. “The device is agitating the corona, probably the photosphere, too. It’s big enough.”
“Holding the wound open,” Oscar muttered. The blemish on the star’s surface was apparent in just about every spectrum: quantum, magnetic, visible. “Radiation,” he said sharply. “Hywel, what’s the radiation emission like?”
“Rising, and fast. Christ. Captain, we’ve got to move, we’re directly above it.”
“I second that,” Reuben said. “One minute until missile engagement.”
“Dervla, take us a quarter of a million kilometers, up and out.”
“Aye, sir.”
The Dublin dropped into FTL for thirty seconds, time mostly taken up by Dervla confirming their relative position before emerging from the wormhole again.
When the ship’s sensors lined up on the strike zone, the turbulence in the corona was a tight-packed cone spewing streamers from its open crest. They could see it growing.
“The device is still active in there,” Hywel said. “Quantum fluctuations are registering at the same level as before. Magnetic activity is increasing. The damn thing is tightening the flux lines like a tourniquet.”
“Oscar,” Wilson called. “Tunde and Natasha believe we’re seeing a flare bomb at work.”
“A what?” he asked, startled. “You mean something like the one used at Far Away?”
“Could be.” Wilson’s voice was perfectly level. “The disturbance in the corona is producing a huge particle discharge, and it’s still building. The radiation is going to saturate Hanko, and we have no idea how long it will go on for. The Far Away flare lasted over a week. Oscar, the biosphere won’t survive that.”
“Oh, shit.” Despite the cata
strophe facing the planet he was supposed to be defending, Oscar was trying to think how the Primes had wound up with a flare bomb. Somehow, the Starflyer must have given them the information how to build one. Was that what the Second Chance dish was transmitting?
“They’re going to sterilize each of the new star systems they’re invading,” Wilson said. “We’ll be forced to evacuate forty-eight worlds.”
“And that’s just so far today,” Reuben grunted.
“What do we do?” Oscar asked. “Do Tunde and Natasha think a quantumbuster will work against the flare bomb?”
“We don’t know. But we’re going to have to find out. We want you to take the Dublin as close as you can to the star and fire a quantumbuster into the flare. Switch it to maximum effect radius.”
“Understood.”
“Admiral, if you use a quantumbuster against a star at that rating, you’ll just be adding to the quantity of energy it’s pumping out,” Reuben said. “It’ll make the radiation deluge even worse.”
“We understand that, Reuben,” Natasha said. “But even on maximum effect radius a quantumbuster mass to energy conversion is very short-lived, and if it knocks out the flare bomb, then only half of the planet will be subject to the radiation. We have no choice. We have to pray that this works.”
“Acknowledged.”
“All right,” Oscar said. “Reuben, arm a quantumbuster, and set it to maximum effect radius. I’m loading my authorization code now. Hywel.”
“Entered,” the first officer said.
Oscar’s virtual vision showed him a quantumbuster was now active. “Thank you. Dervla, take us in as close as you can. We don’t have much time.”
“Aye, sir.”
“We can survive for five seconds at a hundred thousand kilometers,” Teague said.
“Then that’s the distance. Let’s go, people.”
“Mark, we really need those flux shunt regulators integrated.” Thame was trying to keep his voice level and calm, but there was too much stress creeping in; the croak of a man who’d survived the last forty hours on no sleep and way too much caffeine. A man who was getting desperate. Not far from the Searcher, Prime warships were massing. A flare bomb was descending into Wessex’s star. The beginning of the end of the human race was happening right outside.
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