Great North Road

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The Berlin nosed its way forward through the deluge, sending out a cyclone of high-velocity rain to slash at the vegetation. Ravi was at the same level as the vehicles on top of the ravine now, inching closer, compensating for the valley’s random microbursts and the surges of rain. Dead ahead he could see Antrinell Viana and Marvin Trambi, close enough to make out their grim faces. Lightning flashed again, somewhere behind the helicopter. Visuals from the fuselage mesh showed him he was directly overhead the MTJ. Tork opened the fuselage side doors. Ravi locked down the ranging sensors, alert for the Berlin being shoved around by the weather.

  ‘Cleared for winch descent,’ he told Tork.

  The first two men slipped out on the end of tough carbon wire, sliding with arachnid agility down to the accident below. Watching them go, Ravi knew it was going to take an hour to get the five seriously injured Legionnaires up to the Berlin. An hour spent holding position perfectly in the deluge and fickle gusts. He could do that. An hour in these conditions was nothing to an ex-Thunderthorn pilot who’d flown swarm duty.

  *

  Back in 2119 Ravi had been stationed at Groom Lake in southern Nevada, one of the two US Tactical Aerospace Force front-line bases on Earth tasked with exospheric defence. At the time he was thirteen months qualified to fly the new Lockheed SF-100 Thunderthorns, which were America’s major contribution to the HDA.

  When the preliminary Zanthswarm alert came through he was engaged in some serious downtiming in Vegas, busy losing most of his six-month flight bonus. The base commander’s response was immediate and impressive, dispatching a fleet of helicopters out to the gaudy desert jewel town to pick up her service personnel. Everyone was back on station and sobered up within two hours, just as Groom Lake’s war gateway technicians opened a trans-space connection to New Florida.

  Ravi and his co-pilot, Bombardier First Class Dunham Walsh, were in the pre-flight briefing room along with the rest of the Wild Valkyrie pilots, reviewing New Florida’s basic geographical layout. The American world had nine major continents, of which only three – Oakland, Tampa, and Longdade – were developed enough to have states, with senators appointed to sit in Washington. HDA command assigned the Wild Valkyries to defend northern Oakland, an area covering three and a quarter million square miles. The base commander wished them Godspeed, and ordered them to status red.

  Ravi and Dunham drove out to their Thunderthorn, Bad Niobe, under a cold desert night sky, with the stars twinkling brightly overhead – mocking them, Dunham said. Ravi loved the sight of the Thunderthorn’s aggressive three-hundred-and-seventeen-tonne missile-tight profile, as he loved everything about the spaceplane, including the one-point-eight-billion-dollar unit cost. From nose to tail the SF-100 measured fifty-eight metres, with its variable sweep wings fully extended it was fifty-three metres tip to tip, while in their swept position for exoatmospheric flight the wings hunched back to a trim thirty-one metres. In full aerodynamic mode – hatches closed and weapons retracted – it was as sleek as its design team could make it, with sharp curving surfaces blending the wings efficiently into the fuselage; engine nacelles in the wingroots housed turbofans and rockets, sprouting twin shark-profile tailfins on top; a slight bulge on the upper fuselage for the oval cockpit capsule with its narrow silvered wraparound windscreen. The fuselage was a shimmer-black metalloceramic, hugely resistant to the ferocious blasts of heat and radiation it would be soaked with in combat.

  Ravi settled into the pilot’s seat and plugged his suit umbilicals into the sockets. The spaceplane’s tacnet began to upload New Florida exospheric arena data. US Tactical Aerospace Force loaded in their weapon codes. The ground-crew chief confirmed tanks full and hoses uncoupling. Ravi released the ground brakes and the Thunderthorn rolled forward sedately, taking nineteenth place in the line of eighty-five war-ready Wild Valkyries.

  The squadron emerged into the desert night one by one, and growled their way along the base’s taxiways to the trans-space deployment runway. At the far end, the silver-grey oval of the war gateway awaited, like a smear of caged moonlight.

  Ravi watched the squadron commander open up her Thunderthorn’s turbofans, and the big spaceplane surged forwards, accelerating hard along the half-mile runway. The SF-100 had reached its top ground speed of two hundred mph when it streaked through the gateway. A second Thunderthorn was already accelerating along the runway behind it.

  Five galling minutes of waiting later, and Ravi was steering them onto the deployment runway. Watching the four glaring salmon-pink exhausts of Kickass Iole racing away ahead of them, he rammed the throttles to max, and Bad Niobe surged forward eagerly amid a howl of turbines. Acceleration pushed him back into his seat. Kickass Iole vanished into the war gateway in front.

  ‘Scared?’ Ravi yelled out gleefully.

  ‘Oh fuck yeah,’ Dunham shouted back.

  Ravi laughed in delight. And Bad Niobe shot through the war gateway—

  *

  —into space seven hundred and fifty kilometres above New Florida. Noise was sucked away as the thin vapour spume of Earth’s atmosphere that jetted through the gateway with them dispersed with an energetic sparkle, leaving them in the vacuum. Bad Niobe’s turbofans stuttered and died as their air flow vanished. Ravi’s grip on the joystick eased off slightly. The immediate locale seemed clear. Nacelle intake hatches slid shut. Already the war gateway had vanished, jittering away as all unanchored trans-spacial connections did. For once the phenomenon played out in the HAD’s favour, enabling Groom Lake to scatter Thunderthorns into a protective umbrella formation above their designated continent.

  Ravi’s first five seconds were an imperative visual and tactical orientation.

  The planet curved away beneath them, a horizon slicing across Dunham’s side of the windscreen. New Florida’s thick cloud streamers gleamed bright in the gold-tinted sun. Oakland was a sprawl of brown mountains and blue-green vegetation, with its rivers and everglades flashing gold. In the little time Ravi had for a visual sweep he couldn’t see any signs of human civilization lurking beneath the lazy clouds. Nevertheless, there were twelve million US citizens living on the continent below, all desperately trying to reach the gateway that led back to Miami and safety. His task now was to buy them that time.

  Already, bright stars were flaring, not far away by cosmic standards, incandescent blooms of plasma billowing wide. The first Mk-7009 nuclear missiles detonating against the enemy. Ravi never saw them shining brighter than quaint fireworks, the band filters of the cockpit windscreen made sure of that. Bad Niobe wouldn’t let her human crew suffer from the radiation bursts and rampant high-energy particles that were starting to fill space above New Florida’s ionosphere.

  Hatches irised open down Bad Niobe’s spine, allowing sensors to slide out and scan round. A ruff of silver thermal-dump panels concertinaed upwards from the rear fuselage, radiating away the heat generated by the Thunderthorn’s innumerable systems.

  ‘Battle ready,’ Dunham announced.

  A 3D radar display emerged from zero-point and expanded across Ravi’s field of vision, projected by his helmet visor. The image kept jumping, sharp graphic lines fuzzing and juddering.

  ‘Heavy EMP out there,’ he grunted. Twenty seconds since emergence, and they were already in the thick of it. Bad Niobe’s electronics were ultra-hardened against interference, but even her tacnet was affected, operating below optimum efficiency.

  ‘Yeah. Quantum state is in deform, too. Can’t link to the geosats. We’ve got no comnet.’

  ‘Ground stations?’

  ‘Nah. Nukes and rent distortions are screwing the spectrum but good.’

  ‘Okay. Let’s go do our job.’

  Bad Niobe was starting to fall. They hadn’t emerged at orbital velocity, the war gateway vector was locked relative to the planetary surface, so gravity was starting to make itself known. Ravi reached for the joystick again, triggering the reaction control thrusters. Burps of hot gas erupted from the tiny rocket nozzles clustered around the rea
r of the nacelles. The Thunderthorn swung round to stand on her tail, and . . . ‘Son of a motherfucker bitch,’ Ravi whispered as the first true sight of their impassive, terrifyingly unbeatable enemy slid across the windscreen.

  Two hundred kilometres above them, the Zanth was tearing vast rents across spacetime to swarm into the New Florida star system. Jagged nebulas of scarlet and heliotrope were swirling and swelling in seemingly random fluctuations all around the habitable planet, a livid cloak that nearly blotted out the clean stars beyond. Out from the infinite nothingness of the open rents, chunks of Zanth resembling angular teardrops over two hundred metres across at the base were slowly oozing through. Like the Thunderthorns, their velocity relative to the planet was zero. But gravity soon captured them, pulling each chunk into a fall that accelerated them to terminal velocity long before they reached the atmosphere. Faux icebergs with boundless refractive internal planes, they scattered sunlight and starlight around them, casting an iridescent lustre as they dived through empty space.

  ‘Like being crapped on by a fallen angel,’ Dunham grunted.

  ‘No,’ Ravi growled, angry at himself for being thrown by the spectacle of a billion tonnes of prismatic Zanth flakes cascading towards him. ‘There’s nothing angelic about this bastard.’ He fired the Bad Niobe’s six main rockets. Hypergolic fuel mixed and burned in the bell-shaped nozzles at the back of the nacelles. Noise and vibration returned to the cockpit. Three gees acceleration shoved him back hard into the seat, and the Thunderthorn rose on a searing cataract of flame towards the scintillating invader like a wrathful demigod.

  Weapons bay hatches opened. D-bombs missiles telescoped out on their launch rails; their electronics were simple and hardened against the weird quantum instabilities created by the nulldimensional rents. The spherical warhead glowed with the violet malevolence of Cherenkov radiation, as bands of exotic matter were restrained in their compressed state, barely extruding into spacetime.

  Ravi cut the rocket engines, and Bad Niobe continued its silent climb. Directly ahead was a glimmering rent the shape of a mashed candyfloss bulb, tens of thousands of tiny scarlet fissures writhing together in a diabolical cyclone. Zanth chunks slithered out of the burning haze, moving with sedate grace as gold sunlight bathed their myriad facets, and they began their long plunge to the planet.

  ‘That’s our bitch,’ Ravi announced. The quantum sensors around the nose told him the rent was still eighty kilometres away.

  ‘Arming four,’ Dunham said. ‘I-G locked in. Ready to launch in fifteen.’

  ‘Confirm.’ Ravi punched his code into the weapons console. ‘We have actives. You have launch authority.’ Radar was starting to pick up the first of the swarm’s shoals as they closed on New Florida. The damage any one of them would cause by just crashing into the land was enormous. Anybody within a couple of kilometres of one would die in the impact blastquake. Ravi wanted to fire every Mk-7009 Bad Niobe carried, to nuke the Zanth chunks into radioactive fragments.

  ‘It’s not going to make any difference,’ he whispered. The deluge of cold twinkles were spread right across his view now, falling from every point in space. There were thousands of them, tens of thousands . . . And the swarm had only just begun.

  ‘What?’ Dunham asked.

  ‘We’re not going to save anything. Nobody’s going to survive this.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Ravi!’

  Reality impact the Groom Lake shrinks called it. The abrupt realization of the Zanth’s immensity. Faced by an enemy so overwhelming the human soul simply shrank to a foetal ball and whimpered piteously.

  ‘Goddamn it,’ Dunham snarled. He snapped the red guards off the launch switches and flicked each of them. ‘Four lights.’

  Bad Niobe trembled. The missiles streaked away at ten gees, their solid rocket exhaust plumes enveloping the Thunderthorn in a swirl of fizzing sun-drenched particles that was over in seconds.

  Ravi watched the plumes dwindle against the gyrating scarlet rent. The monstrous constellation of Zanth chunks shimmered, growing steadily brighter as gravity pulled them closer.

  ‘What the hell is wrong with you?’ Dunham demanded.

  ‘Can you see what’s out there?’

  ‘Oh yeah. I can see it. Ten seconds until D-bomb contact.’

  Ravi tried not to sneer at the brash optimism. The quantum distortion thrown out by the rents played havoc with electronics. They’d be lucky if just one of the missiles even reached the scarlet horror above. Nonetheless, he found himself counting down.

  Two D-bombs flared, brilliant magenta starbursts of spacial discontinuity pumped by hundred-megatonne fusion explosions, devastating the delicately balanced crimson effervescence that extended back out of spacetime to what- or wherever the Zanth originated. The D-bombs bruised the rent. Ravi could see the brown stain of fractured pseudodimensional fabric shiver, recoiling like living tissue struck by a thunderbolt. The stain spread, fast, ripping through the conductive scarlet fronds. Twisting them. The rent shuddered, spitting out streamers of bizarre energy, as if it was weeping. Then the entire edifice withered, imploding to resurrect a swathe of normal space. And the ever-falling swarm of Zanth.

  Ravi grinned ferociously at them. The D-bombs had worked against the rent, sealing it up. We can make a difference. A small one, but tangible.

  He scanned the radar display. Bad Niobe’s digital functionality was improving again now the rent was gone. The tacnet was plotting vectors for the descending Zanth chunks. Mk-7009s rose out of their bays.

  ‘Let’s do some damage,’ Ravi said.

  *

  Four hours in freefall above New Florida. More evasive manoeuvres than Ravi recalled. Hypergolic fuel down to twenty per cent. A second phase of rents were snaking into existence, five hundred kilometres higher than the first. From Bad Niobe’s altitude, their D-bombs would just reach the new rents. They had seven Mk-7009s left. Once they were gone, the spaceplane would have to let gravity win, begin the long glide back to the surface and through a gateway to Groom Lake where they could re-up the fuel and warloads.

  Four D-bombs soared away towards the spiky vermilion fissure above.

  ‘Incoming,’ Dunham warned.

  Ravi had already seen the hail of boulder-size particles sweeping in. Bad Niobe’s rockets burned ferociously, powering them away. Their sector had steadily become more hazardous as it filled with blast debris hurtling in every direction. He gripped the joystick, rolling the big Thunderthorn. More systems were dropping out. Somewhere south at a lower altitude, a dozen nukes detonated. The radar display was showing almost nothing.

  ‘I don’t—’ Ravi began.

  The impact noise was loud enough to strike his head like a physical blow. He didn’t know if he lost consciousness or not – he certainly couldn’t make sense of anything for an indeterminate time. When he did try and focus again, he couldn’t hear anything, not even his own breathing. His suit had stiffened. Cabin puncture! Didn’t need what was left of the display graphics to know Bad Niobe was tumbling erratically as gravity tugged them down. Something was obscuring half his vision, graphics wiggled across the inside of a dark splodge. His hand came up instinctively to wipe the helmet visor. Gauntlet fingers came away red.

  ‘Dunham.’ Ravi wiped some more of the blood away, twisting round. ‘Dunham – oh fuck it!’ His muscles locked rigid in shock. The pebble-sized Zanth fragment that’d penetrated both the metalloceramic fuselage and the cockpit capsule’s impact armour shielding had sliced Dunham’s head clean off, taking quite a lot of the shoulder with it. The battered helmet was still bouncing casually around the cockpit, spun about by the still-flailing space-plane.

  Ravi fought hard against vomiting. A hand instinctively flipped open his suit’s thigh pouch. He bumped the nausea suppressor. Warm buzz of the drug gushing along his bloodstream.

  Priority: stop Bad Niobe’s tumble. He applied pressure to the joystick, finding out what was left of the reaction control system simply by seeing what response he got
to each nudge. The port nacelle seemed to have taken the most damage. Slowly he cancelled out the giddying motion with incremental burps of gas, bringing the wounded spaceplane to a halt – forty-degree inversion relative to the planet, nose pointing at the south-east horizon. The chewed-up flight console was rearranging itself as the tacnet used the remaining display screens to show essential information. Bad Niobe was still venting something from a split tank. The nose began to drift again.

  Ravi tracked the rogue vent down to a starboard nitrogen tetroxide tank, and opened the valves to drain the remaining liquid through a non-propulsive vent. Several fuel cells had been knocked out. The fuselage stress web was reporting an alarming number of punctures.

  ‘And one dead co-pilot,’ he muttered savagely.

  Radar was still operational, reporting a massive amount of high-velocity particles sleeting through space all around him. The Thunderthorn’s primary defence against collision – the sheer vastness of space – was decreasing with every minute. The Wild Valkyries had been exceptionally successful, nuking hundreds of Zanth. Now Ravi had to live with that success. It would probably kill him soon enough. Even the surviving Zanth were taking a pounding from the fragments.

  Another touch on the joystick, slowly swinging the Thunderthorn round until the nose was pointing directly down at the beleaguered world, and he fired the main rockets again. Only three were functioning, requiring him to vector them constantly. Twenty-second burn, assisting gravity, sending him powering planetward.

  Gravity slowly became more noticeable as the Bad Niobe sank downwards. Ravi changed the big spaceplane’s alignment for the last time, levelling out so the belly was presented flat to the atmosphere. Dunham’s helmet fell lightly onto the cockpit’s floor, coming to rest beside Ravi’s feet, and the headless corpse slumped forward, its arms dangling down. Bloodsplatter that was vacuum-boiling ran sluggishly down the bulkheads and console and windscreen, drawing long crimson trickles as it went.

  Ravi did his best to ignore the gore. Sensors retracted down into their recesses, and the hatches irised shut. Flaps and wing camber actuators ran through their test sequences. Overall functionality wasn’t too good the tacnet surmised. Ravi had a good old fatalistic chortle at that.