Ntoko decided they would be too exposed crossing the open space and took them around the side. Another couple of minutes added to the journey. It didn't help that they heard an autosentinel firing.
The last three hundred meters was a straight sprint. Discipline went all to hell, and the whole platoon charged over the tigergrass, dodging around trees, jumping low rocks, heedless of the target they presented. They made it past the perimeter, where Skins were lying in shallow trenches, armed with the heaviest portable weaponry in their armory.
Ntoko reported to the local lieutenant, who allowed them an hour's rest. They were issued with a ration pack of paste food, which they could eat with their helmets on. Headquarters also gave them a flight number. If the spaceplanes kept up their current schedule, they'd take off in another six hours.
The lieutenant gave them guard duty around the maintenance hangar. They took up position just as the sun sank below the horizon, integrating the new weaponry they'd drawn from the armory. Lawrence had taken a smart missile rack. So far the new-natives hadn't managed to glitch them.
He settled down to walk a regular route, making sure to keep his times random. His visual spectrum sensors provided him with a fuzzy blue-and-white image of the nighttime countryside, with the infrared bleed painting in small vermilion patches as rocks slowly radiated away the heat they'd absorbed during the day. Nothing moved among the tigergrass, not even small animals. He was thankful for that.
When he scoped Roseport, it glowed strongly in infrared, throwing off a coral-pink aura. There were no lights in any of the buildings. The autosentinels were taking shots at something every few minutes. Gossip on the general communication band centered on how much ammunition the robots had left and how long it would last.
Spaceplanes continued to arrive, thumping down out of the night sky amid the strident bellow of their Rolls-Royce turbojets on full reverse thrust. Sometimes they were preceded by the spectacular green-and-crimson magnesium firework display of their countermeasures clearing a path through the air.
An hour after nightfall one of the lost companies made contact. According to their report they'd suffered from a macrorex charge, losing most of their vehicles. On their way back they'd endured near-constant sniping and harassment from new-natives. Then they'd joined up with another company, which had a 30 percent casualty rate. Between them they had enough firepower to keep the new-natives back. It had been slow going with all the injured to care for, but they estimated they'd be arriving at the spaceport in another ninety minutes. Altogether there were over 120 of them.
Lawrence had a flush of guilty relief that it wasn't Lyaute, who would have wanted a damn good explanation about where 435NK9 had got to and what had happened. Everyone else was cheered by the news. It would mean at least one extra spaceplane flight, delaying the final departure by another twenty minutes.
The autosentinels' rate of fire slowed considerably after me first couple of hours, but Lawrence was convinced the new-natives would try to infiltrate the spaceport. It gave him a brittle edge that his Skin pharmacy couldn't dampen. Standing by himself on the edge of the spaceport facing the unknowable threats creeping through the tigergrass was using up a lot of his resolve. The area directly outside had been seeded with hundreds of remote sensors that had secure links to his display grid. He didn't entirely trust them: his droughts were bent toward Calandrinia and how she had quietly mocked them.
Two hours before their scheduled departure time he learned why she had been so confident. Everything she'd said had been true. To start with he thought another Xianti was on its way down and dispensing countermeasures. Several streaks of flame shot across the sky, fading almost immediately. He scanned around, but couldn't locate the intense thermal signature of a spaceplane. More streaks blossomed, stretching out across the stars. As far as the flightpath was concerned, they were in the wrong section of sky. He realized it was a meteor shower and grinned briefly. Before they died away a third batch had begun to fizzle their way down. These Were slightly larger particles, with a bulbous head stretching out a sparkling tail as they tore down through the upper atmosphere. There seemed no end to them streaking out of one section of sky. Lawrence's grin faded. The patch was elongated, extending north-south and still growing.
"Oh, bloody Fate," Lawrence groaned. He understood then. We will seal the sky.
A Skin was running toward him from the hangar.
"Lawrence?" It was Ntoko, using his Skin's speaker on low volume.
"Yeah," Lawrence replied, using his own speaker.
"They've done it, haven't they? This is what Calandrinia was talking about."
"Yeah. They must have nuked the polar-orbit asteroid, pulverized the fucker. This shower's just the edge of the debris swarm."
"Goddamn it! You know all about this orbital-mechanics shit. Can the starships get away through it?"
"Yeah, but they'll have to leave soon, if they haven't already. The debris won't have started to cascade yet. All we have for the moment is just an expanding cloud of rock in polar orbit."
"What's a cascade?"
"Look, the nukes will have shattered the asteroid into a million pieces, okay? Some of them will just fly straight down and burn up in the atmo-sphere. We're seeing that start now. But if the new-natives set the charges right, then there's a shitload of mountains and boulders and pebbles still in orbit. Right now they're separating, flying apart into their own irregular orbit, but once they've spread out enough, then they're going to start colliding. Each boulder that crashes another releases another cascade of smaller rocks, which are going to smash into another batch of rocks and so on. It's a chain reaction that is never going to stop. In a year's time, this planet is going to be surrounded by a shield of rock splinters ten thousand kilometers thick. It'll be like Saturn's rings, only spherical. She was right, that Calandrinia. Nothing will be able to get through this. They have sealed themselves away from the universe. It will take millennia for the shield particles to decay and burn up in the atmosphere. Maybe they never will. Fate, I don't know. Nobody's ever seen a cascade before."
"Okay, grab the guys. Head for that spaceplane." He pointed. "It's fueled."
"But—"
"You said it, man, the starships have got to leave. There aren't going to be any more spaceplane flights after these. Now get your ass in gear, Corporal."
Lawrence pumped his speaker volume up. "To me, people, come on, let's go." He started jogging, then broke into a sprint. Ntoko was shouting as well. The survivors of 435NK9 began running toward them.
High above them, larger debris particles had reached the atmosphere. They screamed down in a sheath of plasma until the pressure shock detonated them into a dazzling halo shoal that expanded and brightened as it sank ever downward. Sometimes the shoal particles would explode again and again as the rocks were broken into smaller and smaller fragments by the superheated ions, sending pyrotechnic shock waves radiating outward. A hundred conical plumes of incandescence flowered against the night, flaring through the spectrum as they slowly withered away to violet specters.